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Few questions in psychology have generated as much debate as those concerning the impact of childhood trauma on memory. A lack of scientific research to constrain theory has helped fuel arguments about whether childhood trauma leads to deficits that result in conditions, such as false memory or lost memory, and whether neurohormonal changes that are correlated with childhood trauma can be associated with changes in memory. Scientists have also struggled with more theoretical concerns, such as how to conceptualize and measure distress and other negative emotions in terms of, for example, discrete emotions, physiological response, and observer ratings. To answer these questions, this book brings together neurobiological, cognitive, clinical, and legal research on stress and memory development. This research examines the effects of early stressful and traumatic experiences on the development of memory in childhood, and elucidates how early trauma is related to other measures of cognitive and clinical functioning in childhood. It also goes beyond childhood to explore the long-term impact of stressful and traumatic experiences on the entire course of “normal” memory development, and determine the longevity of trauma memories that are formed early in life.

This book places the syntactic learning process under close scrutiny. The focus of the book is on the characteristics of linguistic input and the resultant output, which, the book shows, do not necessarily follow the orderly uniform processes assumed by some versions of formalistic linguistic theory. Unique to this book is its reliance on very large English corpora of parental speech and child utterances, revealing surprising new facts about the input and output of syntactic development. Drawing on linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, grammaticalization), Complexity Theory (Self-Organizing Criticality) and quantitative linguistics (corpus linguistics, Zipf curves), it analyzes the input and output languages both theoretically and empirically, building on the contribution of the different source theories in a detailed and explicit manner.

This book uses the case-study method to investigate the essence of toddlerhood—the development of sociolinguistic intelligence that will transform the infant into a child. The author places her case study of one child in the context of other findings on toddler development, drawing heavily on the work of the past 15 years by an array of researchers who have begun to map out the various competencies of toddlerhood. The author offers a comprehensive picture of the whole child and the rapidly developing skills of toddlers as they come to childhood and to a sense of self and the world.

What cognitive abilities underpin the use of tools, and how are tools and their properties represented or understood by tool-users? Does the study of tool use provide us with a unique or distinctive source of information about the causal cognition of tool-users? Tool use is a topic of major interest to all those interested in animal cognition, because it implies that the animal has knowledge of the relationship between objects and their effects. There are countless examples of animals developing tools to achieve some goal — chimps sharpening sticks to use as spears, bonobos using sticks to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows developing complex tools to extracts insects from logs. Studies of tool use have been used to examine an exceptionally wide range of aspects of cognition, such as planning, problem-solving and insight, naive physics, and social relationship between action and perception. A key debate in recent research on animal cognition concerns the level of cognitive sophistication that is implied by animal tool use, and developmental psychologists have been addressing related questions regarding the processes through which children acquire the ability to use tools. In neuropsychology, patterns of impairments in tool use due to brain damage, and studies of neural changes associated with tool use, have also led to debates about the different types of cognitive abilities that might underpin tool use, and about how tool use may change the way space or the body is represented.

From William James to Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to B. F. Skinner, scholars (and parents) have wondered how children move from the blooming, buzzing confusion of infancy, through the tumult of childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. Does development occur continuously over time or in a series of dramatic stages? Is development driven by learning or by biological maturational processes? What is the nature of experience, and how does it generate change? The study of development has always been organized around these big questions. Answers to these questions have a profound influence on daily life, forming a framework for how parents think about their own children, and influencing both national policy and educational curricula. This book defines and refines two major theoretical approaches within developmental science that address the central issues of development-connectionism and dynamical systems theory. The chapters in this book provide an introduction, overview, and critical evaluation of each approach, including three sets of case studies that illustrate how these approaches have been used to study topics ranging from early motor development to the acquisition of grammar. It also presents a collection of commentaries by leading scholars, which offer a critical view from both an “outsiders” and an “insiders” perspective.

Violent video games are increasingly popular, raising concerns by parents, researchers, policy makers, and informed citizens about potential harmful effects. Chapter 1 describes the history of violent games and their explosive growth. Chapter 2 discusses research methodologies, how one establishes causality in science, and prior research on violent television, film, and video games. Chapter 3 presents the General Aggression Model, focusing on how media violence increases aggression and violence in both short and long-term contexts. Important scientific questions are answered by three new studies. Chapter 4 reports findings from a laboratory experiment: even children's games with cartoonish violence increased aggression in children and college students. Chapter 5 reports findings from a survey study of high school students: frequent violent game play leads to an angry and hostile personality and to frequent aggression and violence. Chapter 6 reports findings from the first longitudinal study video game effects: elementary school children who frequently played violent games early in the school year became more verbally and physically aggressive, and less helpful. Chapters 7 and 8 compare a host of risk factors for development of aggression, and find video game effects to be quite important. Chapter 9 describes the role of scientific findings in public policy, industry responses to scientific findings, and public policy options. Chapter 10 recommends that public policy debates acknowledge the harmful effects of violent video games on youth, and urges a more productive debate about whether and how modern societies should act.

How much can we learn about normal visual perception and cognition from a malfunctioning visual system? Quite a lot, as this book makes abundantly clear. This book presents the author's work with AH, who is a college student who has an extraordinary deficit in visual perception. When AH looks at an object, she sees it clearly and identifies it readily; yet she is often dramatically mistaken about where the object is or how it is oriented. For example, she may reach out to grasp an object that she sees on her left, but miss it completely because it is actually on her right; or she may see an arrow pointing up when it is really pointing down. AH's errors, together with many other clues, lead the book to some very interesting conclusions about how we perceive the world. It develops theoretical claims about visual subsystems, the nature of visual location and orientation representations, attention and spatial representations, the role of the visual system in mental imagery, and the levels of the visual system implicated in awareness. This book makes a fascinating and compelling case that we can often learn more about a process when it goes awry than when it functions flawlessly.

Debates within the field of syntactic development frequently come down to disagreements about the very nature of language and of mental development. Indeed, one may see them either as resolving to traditional philosophical disputes (between Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism) or as three co-existing scientific paradigms. For the first time, this book presents these three approaches within two covers: (1) the Rationalism/Nativism of Noam Chomsky, (2) the Empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development, and (3) the Pragmatism of those such as Michael Tomasello who adopt the ‘usage-based’ approach, in which the child is seen as constructing a grammatical inventory piece-by-piece by recruiting general learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge. The book is in four parts. In Part One, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism are presented along with their empirical cash-value for psychology. In Parts Two to Four are presented the approaches to syntactic development they inspire. The author's own sympathies lie with the Chomskyan approach, sympathies which emerge along the way rather than being explicitly located. The Chomskyan approach deserves our serious attention, because this is the only approach on which the question of how thought comes to be manifested in speech is accorded the problematic status that it truly has.

The study of word meanings promises important insights into the nature of the human mind by revealing what people find to be most cognitively significant in their experience. However, as we learn more about the semantics of various languages, we are faced with an interesting problem. Different languages seem to be telling us different stories about the mind. For example, important distinctions made in one language are not necessarily made in others. What are we to make of these cross-linguistic differences? How do they arise? Are they created by purely linguistic processes operating over the course of language evolution? Or do they reflect fundamental differences in thought? In this sea of differences, are there any semantic universals? Which categories might be given by the genes, which by culture, and which by language? And what might the cross-linguistic similarities and differences contribute to our understanding of conceptual and linguistic development? The kinds of mapping principles, structures, and processes that link language and non-linguistic knowledge must accommodate not just one language but the rich diversity that has been uncovered. The integration of knowledge and methodologies necessary for real progress in answering these questions has happened only recently, as experimental approaches have been applied to the cross-linguistic study of word meaning. This book looks at evidence from the leading researchers who are carrying out this empirical work on topics as diverse as spatial relations, events, emotion terms, motion events, objects, body-part terms, causation, color categories, and relational categories. Some of the most exciting cross-linguistic and cross-cultural work on the language-thought interface, from a broad array of fields including linguistics, anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology are presented.