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Scientific psychology is a European–Western export onto the rest of the globe. This chapter contributes to the emerging “movement” to curb such imposition. It sketches the development of Africa's young citizens to introduce developmental knowledge about a significant part of the world—Afric—that is underrepresented in developmental science. It highlights how Africa's theocentric worldview primes pronatalist values, inserts childrearing into extended families, and fosters individuation by connecting a unique personal identity to that of the shared social person. It further exposes the nature of Africa's developmental ecology, sociogenic developmental trajectory, and principles and processes that ordain it, and what Africentric policy research should focus on. The main lesson is that the ideas, issues, and practices that shape development in Africa diverge from those of the Euro-west that drive contemporary developmental science. As such, they are poised to enrich theorization and extend the discipline's methods and knowledge base.

Gaps for minority and low-income students' achievements have shown minute changes over the past two decades which have resulted in mandated improvements for public education. A major federal legislation is the No Child Left Behind policy. However, early childhood educators and researchers disapproved of NCLB legislation due to its restricted emphasis on reading achievement. Developmental science argues that school readiness is a multidimensional concept that includes diverse cognitive, social, and physical skills sets related to academic success. A developmental-ecological model provides a useful theoretical framework in which to examine early childhood research. This chapter illustrates research taken from a brief longitudinal study of the relationships between competence motivation, socioemotional adjustment, and early literacy and mathematics abilities at kindergarten and first grade levels.

The focus of this book is on the detection and interpretation of intentional social entities. While Fritz Heider is often considered one of the major influences on social psychology his emphasis on the perception of intentional action may have had even greater influence within the field of developmental psychology. Heider was interested in causal attribution, and schooled in the non-social causal attribution that was of interest in his time. He made a novel advance by bringing the logic of causal attribution into the social domain. The present volume has an empirical emphasis on vision science, developmental science, and neuroscience owing to a recent upswing in research in these areas coupled with technological advances. Theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms that cut across these areas are: Developmental Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Neurocience, and Clinical Approaches. The goal was a collection of chapters that told a coherent story about three aspects of social perception: the perception of biological motion, the perception of animacy, and the attributions of intentionality.

Building on the framework of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development, this chapter summarizes previous chapters and testifies to the “village” needed to raise a child by providing new understanding of children’s and families’ transactions with the social, physical, and cultural environments in which they live. The reviewed chapters provide perspectives on the social and cultural assumptions that affect scholars’ research questions, as well as policy makers’ and practitioners’ actions. They confirm the premises that (a) policy is critical to basic science, offering unique opportunities to understand developmental processes, and (b) developmental science offers important tools for policy and practice that may be exploited more extensively as our understanding of knowledge use expands.

This chapter examines the basis of cognitive pragmatics, first by outlining certain fundamental methodological aspects. It considers instruments used to validate theories and how a theory may be falsified to determine whether it can withstand all criticisms. The chapter explores developmental cognitive science and the key points of this methodology, namely formalization, construction, and neural correlation, and also discusses shared belief and communicative intention, primitives that are essential to the theory of cognitive pragmatics. It then looks at conversational and behavioral cooperation in communication, along with mental states, attention, and intentionality. The chapter also discusses the differences among deliberate and conscious communication acts; intentional, nondeliberate, and conscious communication acts; intentional, deliberate, and unconscious communication acts; intentional, nondeliberate, and unconscious communication acts; and unintentionally communicative actions and modes of being.

Building on The Child’s Theory of Mind (Wellman, 1990), this book provides a comprehensive sequel. Since 1990, the importance of theory of mind has become widely accepted and its nature widely researched. However, the accumulating findings include gaps and contradictions reflecting current divides about how to characterize foundational human cognition and in particular theory of mind—is it massively domain specific or domain general; does it manifest naïve theories, conceptual modules, or a learned social expertise? This introduction outlines the issues and the approach taken up in the rest of the book. The chapter argues that data and theories are more telling and commensurate than often thought, yield a number of clear conclusions, and indeed have achieved some uncelebrated consensus amid the disputes and unknowns. The chapter outlines the disputes and its constructivist, theory-theory approach to tackling them to reveal how we develop an everyday understanding of our mental lives.