The Opposites of Identity

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26 Development Across the Life Span complementary accounts. They argue that the problem with the question of How much John’s going out with Sue stems from her beauty rather than from his love of beautiful women. . . . is not that it is difﬁcult to answer; it is that it is conceptually incoherent. It is in- coherent because it construes two classes of accounts that are in fact complementary as if they were competing. The heart of our argument is that one must take this point seriously. All behavior is jointly a product of environmental stimuli and dispositions. (p. 43) A similar but subtler example is found in a recently pub- lished dialogue on spatial development. Uttal begins this dialogue with the seemingly complementary view that his claims about spatial development “are based on the assump- tion that the relation between maps and the development of spatial cognition is reciprocal in nature” (2000, p. 247). How- ever, in a commentary on Uttal’s article, Liben (2000) raises the question of whether Utall is in fact operating within the context of an identity of opposites, which she proposes as her own approach. As I read his thesis, Uttal seems to be suggesting an independent contribution of maps, positing that exposure to maps can play a causal role in leading children to develop basic spatial concepts. My own preference is to propose a more radically interdepen- dent [italics added] role of organismic and environmental factors. (p. 272) The Opposites of Identity If we think of the identity of opposites as a kind of ﬁgure- ground problem then, to this point, the ﬁgure has primarily been the proposition that within a relational metatheory, ideas—that in other metatheoretical systems act as bedrock foundational competing alternatives—exhibit an underlying identity. Equally important, but operating as ground to this point, is the already alluded-to fact that this identity is one of opposites . To now make these opposites the ﬁgure, opens the way to a third component of a relational metatheory: generat- ing relatively stable platforms from which to launch empiri- cal inquiry. Without the opposites of identity there would be only the identity of identities and this would present little opportunity for serious empirical work. It has already been noted that a relational metatheory rejects splits and bedrocks. If this were the end of the story—as would be the case with an identity of identities—then we would have eliminated the absolute objective realism of modernity, but we would still be in danger of falling into the absolute relativism of post- modernism. What is needed is some way to introduce a rela- tive relativism or a relative realism—both would mean the same—in order to establish a stability sufﬁcient to make em- pirical inquiry possible and meaningful. This goal is met by taking the oppositional moment of analysis as ﬁgure and the identity moment of analysis as ground. When relational terms are viewed as opposites, each asserts a unique identity that differentiates it from other identities. These unique differen- tial qualities are stable within any general system and thus may form a relatively stable platform for empirical inquiry. These platforms become standpoints, points of view, or lines of sight in recognition that they do not reﬂect absolute foun- dations (Harding, 1986). Again, considering Escher’s sketch, when left hand as left hand and right as right are the focus of attention, it then becomes quite clear that—were they large enough—one could stand on either hand and examine the structures and functions of that hand. Thus, to return to the nature-nurture example, while explicitly recognizing that any behavior is 100% nature and 100% nurture, alternative points of view permit the scientist to analyze the behavior from a biological or from a cultural standpoint. Biology and culture no longer constitute competing alternative explana- tions; rather, they are two points of view on an object of in- quiry that has been both created by and will only be fully understood through multiple viewpoints. To state this more generally, the unity that constitutes human identity and human development becomes discovered only in the diver- sity of multiple interrelated lines of sight. Synthesis: The View From the Center Engaging fundamental bipolar concepts as relatively stable standpoints opens the way and takes an important ﬁrst step toward establishing a broad stable base for empirical inquiry within a relational metatheory. However, this solution is in- complete because it omits a key relational component. The oppositional quality of the bipolar pairs reminds us that their contradictory nature still remains and still requires a resolution. As suggested earlier, the resolution of this tension between contradictions is not found in the reduction of one of the system polarities to the other. Rather, moving to the middle and above the conﬂict—and here discovering a novel system that coordinates the two conﬂicting systems— establishes the resolution. This position is a position of syn- thesis and it constitutes another standpoint. At this point the Escher sketch fails as a graphic represen- tation. Although Drawing Hands illustrates the identity of opposites and shows the middle ground, it does not present a coordination of the two. In fact, the synthesis for this sketch Relational Metatheory: A Synthesis of Opposites 27 is the unseen hand that has drawn the drawing hands. The synthesis of interest for the general metatheory would be a system that is a coordination of the most universal bipolarity we can imagine. Undoubtedly there are several candidates for this level of generality, but the polarity between matter and society seems sufﬁcient for present purposes. What then rep- resents the synthesis of matter and society? Arguably it is the human organism (Latour, 1993). Because our speciﬁc focus of inquiry is psychology, we can reframe this matter-society polarity as the polarity of biology and culture . In the context of psychology, then, as an illustration write “biology” on one and “culture” on the other Escher hand, and what is the resulting synthesis?—the human organism, the person (see Figure 1.3). Persons—as integrated self-organizing dynamic systems of cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes—represent a novel level or stage of structure and functioning that emerges from and constitutes a coordination of biology and culture (see Magnusson & Stattin, 1998). At the synthesis, then, there is a standpoint that coordi- nates and resolves the tension between the other two mem- bers of the relation. This provides a particularly broad and stable base for launching empirical inquiry. A person stand- point opens the way for the empirical investigation of univer- sal dimensions of psychological structure-function relations (e.g., processes of perception, thought, emotions, values), their individual differences, and their development— (transformational-variational) across the life span. Because universal and particular are themselves relational concepts, no question can arise here about whether the focus on univer- sal processes excludes the particular; it clearly does not, as we already know from the earlier discussion of polarities. The fact that a process is viewed from a universal standpoint in no way suggests that it is not contextualized. The general theories of Jean Piaget, Heinz Werner, James Mark Baldwin, William Stern, attachment theory and object relations theo- ries of John Bowlby, Harry Stack Sullivan, Donald Winnicott all are exemplars of developmentally oriented relational person standpoints . It is important to recognize that one synthesis standpoint is relative to other synthesis standpoints. Human and society are coordinated by matter, and thus—within psychological inquiry— biology represents a standpoint as the synthesis of person and culture (Figure 1.3). The implication of this is that a relational biological approach to psychological processes investigates the biological conditions and settings of psycho- logical structure-function relations. This exploration is quite different from split-foundationalist approaches to biological inquiry that assume an atomistic and reductionistic stance towards the object of study. The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio’s (1994, 1999) work on the brain-body basis of a psychological self and emotions is an excellent illustration of this biological relational standpoint. And in the context of his biological investigations, Damasio points out A task that faces neuroscientists today is to consider the neurobi- ology supporting adaptive supraregulations [e.g., the psycholog- ical subjective experience of self] . . . I am not attempting to reduce social phenomena to biological phenomena, but rather to discuss the powerful connection between them. (1994, p. 124) …. Realizing that there are biological mechanisms be- hind the most sublime human behavior does not imply a simplis- tic reduction to the nuts and bolts of neurobiology (1994, p. 125). A similar illustration comes from the Nobel laureate neurobi- ologist Gerald Edelman’s (1992; Edelman & Tononi, 2000) work on the brain-body base of consciousness: I hope to show that the kind of reductionism that doomed the thinkers of the Enlightenment is confuted by evidence that has emerged both from modern neuroscience and from modern physics. . . . To reduce a theory of an individual’s behavior to a theory of molecular interactions is simply silly, a point made clear when one considers how many different levels of physical, bio- logical, and social interactions must be put into place before higher order consciousness emerges. (Edelman, 1992, p. 166) A third synthesis standpoint recognizes that human and matter are coordinated by society, and again granting that the inquiry is about psychological processes, culture represents a standpoint as the synthesis of person and biology (Fig- ure 1.3). Thus, a relational cultural approach to psychological ©(B)(A) Culture standpoint Biology Person Biology standpoint Person Culture Person standpoint Biology Culture Figure 1.3 Relational standpoints in psychological inquiry: person, biology, and culture. 28 Development Across the Life Span processes explores the cultural conditions and settings of psychological structure-function relations. From this cultural standpoint, the focus is upon cultural differences in the con- text of psychological functions as complementary to the per- son standpoint’s focus on psychological functions in the context of cultural differences. This standpoint is illustrated by cultural psychology, or developmentally oriented cultural psychology. However, not all cultural psychologies emerge from standpoint background ideas. When, for example, a cultural psychology makes the social constructivist assertion that social discourse is “prior to and constitutive of the world” (Miller, 1996, p. 99), it be- comes clear that this form of cultural psychology has been framed by split-foundationalist background ideas. Similarly, when sociocultural claims are made about the “primacy of social forces,” or claims arise suggesting that “mediational means” (i.e., instrumental-communicative acts) constitute the necessary focus of psychological interest (e.g., see Wertsch, 1991), the shadows of split-foundationalist metatheoretical principles are clearly in evidence. A recent example of a relational developmentally oriented cultural standpoint emerges from the work of Jaan Valsiner (1998), which examines the “social nature of human psychol- ogy.” Focusing on the social nature of the person, Valsiner stresses the importance of avoiding the temptation of try- ing to reduce person processes to social processes. To this end he explicitly distinguishes between the dualisms of split-foundationalist metatheory and dualities of the rela- tional stance he advocates. Ernst Boesch (1991) and Lutz Eckensberger (1990) have also presented an elaboration of the cultural standpoint . Boesch’s cultural psychology and Eckensberger’s theoretical and empirical extensions of this draw from Piaget’s cognitive theory, from Janet’s dynamic theory, and from Kurt Lewin’s social ﬁeld theory, and argues that cultural psychology aims at an integration of individual and cultural change, an integration of individual and collec- tive meanings, and a bridging of the gap between subject and object (e.g., see Boesch, 1991). In a similar vein Damon offers a vision of the cultural standpoint in his discussion of “two complementary develop- mental functions, . . . the social and the personality functions of social development” (1988, p. 3). These are presented by Damon as an identity of opposites. The social function is an act of integration serving to “establish and maintain relations with other, to become an accepted member of society-at- large, to regulate one’s behavior according to society’s codes and standards” (p. 3). The personality function, on the other hand, is the function of individuation, an act of differentiation serving the formation of the individual’s personal identity that requires “distinguishing oneself from others, determin- ing one’s own unique direction in life, and ﬁnding within the social network a position uniquely tailored to one’s own par- ticular nature, needs, and aspirations” (p. 3). Although others could be mentioned as illustrative (e.g., Grotevant, 1998), it should be noted in conclusion here that Erik Erikson (1968), was operating out of exactly this type of relational standpoint when he described identity as “a process ‘located’ in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture ” (p. 22). As a ﬁnal point concerning syntheses and the view from the center, it needs to be recognized that a relational metathe- ory is not limited to three syntheses. For example, discourse or semiotics may also be taken as a synthesis of person and culture (Latour, 1993). In this case biology and person are conﬂated and the biological-person dialectic represents the opposites of identity that are coordinated by discourse. As a general summary to this point, the argument has been made that metatheoretical principles form the ground out of which grow the theories and methods of any domain of em- pirical inquiry. This has been illustrated by exploring several issues that frame the ﬁeld of developmental psychology. Historically, both the modern and postmodern eras have articulated broad metatheoretical paradigms that have func- tioned as competing alternatives in the natural and social sci- ences. The commonality of these paradigms has been that each shares the background assumptions of splitting and foundationalism. A relational paradigm, which begins by rejecting these assumptions, offers a rapprochement of the alternatives through an elaboration of the principles of the identity of opposites, the opposites of identity, and the syn- thesis of opposites. The question of the speciﬁc nature of this rapprochement remains. A RAPPROCHEMENT: EXPLANATION IN A RELATIONAL CONTEXT The rapprochement between the natural and social sciences emerges from transforming the historically traditional dicho- tomies of observation versus interpretation and theory versus data into relational bipolar dimensions. Given this movement in grounding, mechanical explanation and hermeneutic under- standing become an integrated metamethod in the following manner. Step 1: Relational Analysis—Synthesis Replaces Split Reductionism Clearly the reduction and atomism of mechanical explanation are split principles and they need to be replaced. Simply A Rapprochement: Explanation in a Relational Context 29 anointing holism as the guiding principle is not possible be- cause holism, at least as often interpreted, is itself a split prin- ciple. Rather, integration requires that analysis and synthesis operate as a relational polarity. Analysis must occur in the context of some integrated whole, and the integrated whole operates in the context of its analytic parts. Because a rela- tional metatheory is sometimes incorrectly viewed as less rigorous than mechanical explanation, a major feature of this ﬁrst step is the afﬁrmation of the importance of analysis and the analytic tools of any empirical science. The provisos here are that it simultaneously be recognized that the analytic mo- ment always occurs in the context of a moment of synthesis and that the analysis can neither eliminate nor marginalize synthesis. Step 2: Relational Action Pattern—Conditions Explanation Replaces Split Causes As noted earlier, the deﬁning marks of mechanical explana- tion and hermeneutic understanding have been the “nothing but” reliance on causes and action patterns, respectively. By entering into a relational context, these forms of explanation become integrated. In a relational context, causes are trans- formed from interpretation-free observed objects or events that produce changes in other objects or event into conditions that are associated with changes. A cause is interpretation free only when analysis is split from synthesis; in a relational model conditions—as an analytic moment of inquiry—are understood as functioning under some interpretation and some synthesis (Hanson, 1958). A cause can be a force that produces, inﬂuences, or affects the status or change of an object only in a model that splits system and activity; in a re- lational model, system and activity are joined as a structure- function relation. In a relational model, condition s are identiﬁed as necessary, sufﬁcient, or both to the occurrence of the phenomenon under investigation (von Wright, 1971). Thus, rather than inquiry into the causes of behavior or de- velopment, inquiry from a relational perspective examines conditions that are associated with behavior or development. For example, if inquiry concerned the development of a plant, food and water would represent necessary conditions for the plant to grow, but would not cause the plant’s devel- opment in the sense of producing that development. Simi- larly, neither nature factors nor nurture factors can be considered the cause of human development; they represent conditions that are associated with that development. The assertion that causes are best understood as conditions leaves open the question of what in fact does produce behav- ior and change. The issue here is that of mechanisms. As is the case with other key terms, mechanism has several often in- compatible deﬁnitions. In the present case the meaning is closer to “a process, physical or mental, by which something is done or comes into being” than to “the doctrine that all natural phenomena are explicable by material causes and mechanical principles” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000) online). Hence, for present purposes, mechanism is deﬁned as an active method or process rather than a cause or set of causes. These mecha- nisms are found in the structure-function relations that identify action patterns. Any active system constitutes a structure-function relation. The system is not a random aggre- gate of elements; it has a speciﬁc organization, an architecture (i.e., a structure). Further, this structure is not randomly active; it has a characteristic activity (i.e., a function). Even computers (structure)—when they are turned on—compute (function). However, computers do not change—at least they do not change in a transformational manner—and for this reason they are rather limited as models of the human mind (Fodor, 2000). The input and output of a computer may change, and this is the basis for traditional and contemporary split functionalist approaches to explanation (Overton, 1994a). However, the organization-activity of the computer itself does not undergo transformational change. Living organisms, on the other hand, are dynamic systems; they are organizations (structures) that are inherently active (function) and exhibit transformational change (dynamic). When a system is viewed from the standpoint of function, it is the function itself (i.e., the characteristic action of the system) that constitutes the mechanism of behavior and change. Systems change through their characteristic action on or in the context of external conditions. Thus, the expla- nation of behavior and change is given by the function of the system (see Thelen & Smith, 1998). Further, because of the relation of structure and function, when a system is viewed from the standpoint of structure, structure then explains function. Consequently, both structure and function enter centrally into the explanatory process. Structure and function are central to explanation, but they are also fundamentally interpretative in nature; they are not directly observable. Structure-function relations are patterns of action, but patterns are never directly observed; they must be inferred. When examined from the structural stand- point, the patterns constitute Aristotle’s formal and ﬁnal explanations. From the structural standpoint, action patterns make the object of inquiry intelligible and give reasons for the nature and functioning of the object. From the functional standpoint, action patterns explain by presenting the mecha- nism of behavior and development. Action patterns, however, necessarily operate within the context of material conditions both internal to the system and external to it. Thus, the 30 Development Across the Life Span introduction of structure-function relations serves to inte- grate hermeneutic explanation and natural science conditions explanation. Both types of explanation are necessary, but each operates from a different standpoint. Developmental psychology offers several illustrations of this explanatory integration. For example, Bowlby’s (1958) theory of infant-caregiver attachment posits a behav- ioral attachment system (structure) in relation to actions that serve the adaptive function of keeping the caregiver in close proximity. Piaget’s (1952, 1985) theory presents a more gen- eral example. This theory represents an attempt to make sense of (i.e., explain) the development of knowing. Like Bowlby’s, Piaget’s is a relational theory that takes seriously the back- ground ideas of structure-function and conditions. Because the theoretical goal is to explain the person and the develop- ment of the knowing person, Piaget takes a person (and epis- temic) standpoint rather than a biological or a cultural standpoint. The theory conceptualizes the person as a dy- namic self-organizing action system operating in a world of biological and environmental conditions. Structure and function constitute thesis and antithesis, and the resulting syn- thesis is transformational change or stages of new structure- function relations. Structures are the mental organizations that are expressed as patterns of action. On the structural side of the equation, Piaget introduces the theoretical concepts schemes, coordination of schemes, operations, groupings, and group. Each explains (i.e., formal explanation)—at successive novel levels of transformation—the cognitive equipment that the infant, toddler, child, and adolescent come to have available for constructing their known worlds. Theoretical concepts of adaptation, assimilation- accommodation, equilibrium, equilibration, and reﬂective abstraction, constitute the functional side of the equation. Schemes, coordinated schemes, operations, and so forth function; they are active and it is through their action in a world of conditions that they change. Piaget’s is an action theory and action is the general mechanism of development. Through the organized actions of the person in the world, the person’s mode of knowing the world changes and these changes are adaptive. Action as the mechanism of develop- ment becomes more speciﬁc through recognition of its bipha- sic nature. Assimilation is the phase of action that expresses the mental organization. This expression gives meaning to the world; it constitutes the world as known. However, these meanings—including meanings at a presymbolic, preconcep- tual stage—have an instrumental function as well as the expressive function. When the instrumental function of the action is not completely successful in securing an adaptive goal, variation occurs in the action. For example, an infant may intend (assimilate) the side of the breast as a nipple by sucking it, but when the satisfaction of feeding does not occur, variations arise in the action and this is exempliﬁed by the sucking in various new locations. Variations open new possibilities that both secure a goal and feedback to transform (differentiations and novel coordinations) the system itself. This action phase of variation and organizational modiﬁca- tion is the accommodation phase of any action. Organization explains in the sense of establishing the form (structure), and action yields the explanatory mechanism (function). This relational polarity operates in the context of conditions, such as parents who do or do not provide appro- priate opportunities for the adequate exercise of functioning. It is also the case that at the beginning of any stage of novel structure-function relations, the capacity for successful adap- tation is limited. This is theoretically expressed in the idea that there is more assimilation than accommodation at the be- ginning of a stage; hence, there is a lack of balance or equi- librium between assimilation and accommodation. Through action this imbalance changes and the two phases of action eventually move into equilibrium within a given stage. Of course, given the relational nature of the theory, equilibrium of assimilation and accommodation also means that the un- derlying structures have reached a stable state (equilibrium) of differentiation and intercoordination. The movement toward equilibrium of the action phases of assimilation and accommodation describes the development mechanism within a stage. To explain development across stages, Piaget introduces a principle that also has both a struc- tural and a functional face. Structurally, this is the equilibra- tion principle (Piaget, 1985) and it asserts that development change is directed toward improved states or patterns of the just-described equilibrium. Improved here is deﬁned in terms of the adaptive value of one stage of cognitive structures relative to the adaptive value of other stages of cognitive structures. For example, the formal operational structures as- sociated with adolescence represent an improved equilibrium over sensorimotor structures associated with infancy in that the formal structures are more stable, more ﬂexible, and describe a much broader range of potential cognitive experi- ences than do sensorimotor structures. The equilibration principle introduces hierarchical organization into the theory and explains sequence, order, and direction in the emergence of novel cognitive abilities, just as the second law of thermo- dynamics explains sequence, order, and direction with respect to the physical world. It reﬂects Aristotle’s metatheo- retical ﬁnal explanation, and it is consistent with the struc- tural ﬁnal explanations offered in other developmental theories, including Heinz Werner’s (1957, 1958) orthogenetic principle and Erik Erikson’s (1968) epigenetic principle. The functional face of the mechanism of development across stages is termed reﬂective abstraction. Reﬂective abstraction is action, but it is action that has its own biphasic A Rapprochement: Explanation in a Relational Context 31 ABDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS BACKGROUND OBSERVATION Figure 1.4 The abductive process. character consisting of reﬂecting in the sense of projecting something from a lower to a higher level, and reﬂexion, which is the reorganization of what has been projected. The alterna- tion of the reﬂecting-reﬂexion phases produces each new stage of cognitive reorganization. Reﬂection is similar to the act of generalizing; reﬂexion is acting from the generalized position to consolidate the gains made through generalizing. What is abstracted in this process is the coordination of the differentiated structures of the lower level of organization. Step 3: Abductive Logic Replaces Split Induction and Deduction The third step towards a relational metamethod that integrates mechanical explanation and hermeneutic understanding ad- dresses the nature of scientiﬁc logic. Modern mechanical ex- planation split acts of discovery and acts of justiﬁcation and identiﬁed the former with a foundational inductive logic and the latter with a deductive logic. Interpretation-free induction from interpretation-free data was the vehicle for the discovery of hypotheses, theories, laws, and interpretation-free deduc- tion was the vehicle for their justiﬁcation. A relational metamethod introduces the logic of abduction as the synthesis of the opposite identities of theory (broadly considered, in- cluding background ideas) and data. Abduction (also called retroduction ) was originally described by the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce (1992), and the historian of science N. R. Hanson (1958) has argued that it has long been the fundamental—if often invisible—logic of scientiﬁc activ- ity. In a contemporary version, this logic is termed inference to the best explanation (Fumerton, 1993; Harman, 1965). Abduction operates by arranging the observation under consideration and all background ideas (here, including speciﬁc theoretical ideas) as two Escherian hands. The possi- ble coordination of the two is explored by asking the question of what must necessarily be assumed in order to have that observation (see Figure 1.4). The inference to—or interpreta- tion of—what must in the context of background ideas necessarily be assumed then comes to constitute the explana- tion of the phenomenon. The abductive process has also been termed the transcendental argument . Abductive inference is illustrated in virtually any psycho- logical work that assumes a centrality of emotional, motiva- tional, or cognitive mental organization. Russell (1996), for example, has discussed the signiﬁcance of abduction to the area of cognition. Chomsky’s work in language and Piaget’s work in cognitive development are particularly rich in abduc- tive inference. Consider as an illustration of the process the following example drawn from Piaget: 1. There is the phenomenal observation (O) that it is the case that a certain group of people (children around 6–7 years of age) understands that concepts maintain the same quantity despite changes in qualitative appearances (i.e., conservation). 2. Given the relational background ideas discussed in this paper, Piaget forms the abductive inference that the expla- nation of this observation (E) is that a certain type of action system, having speciﬁed features including reversibility (i.e., concrete operations), must be available to these peo- ple. This forms the conditional statement “If (E) concrete operational structure, then (O) conservation, is expected.” 3. Given (O), the conclusion is, “Therefore, concrete oper- ational structure explains the understanding of con- servation.” This, of course, is not the end of the process, as criteria must be established that allow choice among alternative Es—the best E. But this is not a major hurdle, because many of the criteria for theory-explanation selection that were articulated within traditional modern science can readily be incorporated here. These criteria include the explanation’s depth, coher- ence, logical consistency, extent to which it reduces the pro- portion of unsolved to solved conceptual and empirical problems in a domain (Laudan 1977), and last but not least, scope, empirical support, and empirical fruitfulness. Scope,empiricalsupport,andfruitfulnessaspart criteria for choice of a best theory-explanation all demand a return to the observational grounds for empirical assessment. Some of the statistical and research strategies associated with this return are described in detail by Rozeboom (1997). Scope is assessed through testing the abductive explanation in observational contexts that go beyond thecontext that generated the explana- tion. For example, conservation may be assessed in the contexts of number,weight, number, area, volume,or it maybe assessed in relation to other skills that should—in the context of the explanation—be associated with it. The assessment of scopealso serves the function ofestablishingthattheabductive explanation-observation relation is not viciously circular (i.e., does not constitute an identity of identities). The fruitfulness of an explanation is measured in terms of the extent to which the explanation combines with other 32 Development Across the Life Span ABDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS BACKGROUND OBSERVATION ABDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS BACKGROUND OBSERVATION Becomes ABDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS BACKGROUND OBSERVATION Becomes Figure 1.5 Scientiﬁc progress through abduction. abductive hypotheses to generate (predict) new observations. Each new abductive hypothesis in the relational triangle (Figure 1.4) becomes a part of background (background ideas-theory) and thus creates a new enlarged background (see Figure 1.5). The new background generates novel obser- vations, but these too—because they constitute a back- ground-observation relation—yield opposite identities that require further abductive inferences. Empirical support for an abductive explanation is the out- come of any assessment of scope. Here, another central fea- ture of a relational metamethod needs to be differentiated from the traditional modern split metamethod. Under the rule of split-off induction and deduction, it was assumed that scientiﬁc progress moved forward through the deductive falsiﬁcation of theories (Popper, 1959). The criterion of falsiﬁcation, however, fell into disrepute through demonstra- tions by several historians and philosophers of science (e.g., Hanson, 1958; T. S. Kuhn, 1962; Lakatos, 1978; Laudan, 1977; Putnam, 1983; Quine, 1953) that although deductive logic, and hence falsiﬁcation, is applicable to a speciﬁc ex- perimental hypothesis, falsiﬁcation does not reach to the level of rich theories (i.e., background is abductive in character, not inductive nor deductive). Within a relational metatheory, these demonstrations lead to the principle that falsiﬁed exper- imental hypotheses are important in that they constitute failures of empirical support for the broader abductive expla- nation, but they are not important in the sense of constituting a refutation of the explanation. T. S. Kuhn, Lakatos, and Luadan describe these failures as anomalous instances for the background, and as such they require evaluation; but they do not in and of themselves require abandonment of the abductive explanation (see Overton, 1984, 1994a). To this point a relational metatheory and an integrative metamethod have been described, and the manner in which these ground, constrain, and sustain various developmentally relevant issues, theories, and methods has been illustrated. The next section of this paper presents a broad illustration of the application of relational metatheory to developmental inquiry. EMBODIED DEVELOPMENT: A RELATIONAL CONCEPT This illustration focuses on embodied development. Until re- cently, the trend of developmental inquiry over the past two decades had been moving towards ever-increasing fragmenta- tion of the object of study. Beginning in the early 1980s the ex- amination of human development aggressively promoted split and foundational approaches to inquiry, including variable- centered, discourse, modular, and domain-speciﬁc inquiry. Each of these potentially alternative foci was advanced with claims that it presented the bedrock form of explanation. The result was that inquiry into human development was increas- ingly split into biologically determined, culturally deter- mined, and bioculturally determined behavior, innate modules of mind, situated cognitions, domain-speciﬁc understandings, and communicative and instrumental functioning. What be- came lost in the exclusivity of these projects was the person as a vital integrated embodied center of agency and action. This is the embodied person—functioning as a self-organizing dy- namic action system—expressively projecting onto the world, and instrumentally communicating with self and world, thoughts, feelings, wishes, beliefs, and desires. This is the em- bodied person who emerges from and transacts with the rela- tional biological-cultural world, thereby developmentally transforming her own expressive and adaptive functioning. The concept of embodiment was most thoroughly articulated in psychology by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1963) and it represents a relational attempt to mend the split understanding of body as exclusively physical and mind as exclusively mental. Embodiment represents the over- arching synthesis described earlier between each of the Embodied Development: A Relational Concept 33 PERSON EMBODIMENT BIOLOGICAL EMBODIMENT CULTURAL EMBODIMENT Figure 1.6 Embodiment as synthesis. biology-person-culture relations (see Figure 1.6); thus, em- bodiment creates a seamless bridge between the biological, the psychological, and the sociocultural. It has a double meaning, referring both to the body as physical structure, and the body as a form of lived experience, actively engaged with the world of sociocultural and physical objects. As Merleau- Ponty (1963) states with respect to embodiment as the form of life or life form ( Lebensform ), One cannot speak of the body and of life in general, but only of the animal body and animal life, of the human body and of human life; . . . the body of the normal subject . . . is not distinct from the psychological. (p. 181) Embodiment is not the claim that various bodily states have a causal relation to our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. It would simply be trivial to suggest, for example, that when we close our eyes we perceive differently from when our eyes are open. Rather, embodiment is the claim that perception, thinking, feelings, desires—that is, the way we experience or live the world—is contextualized by being an active agent with this particular kind of body (Taylor, 1995). In other words, the kind of body we have is a precondition for the kind of experiences and meanings that we generate. Ultimately, embodiment is the afﬁrmation that the lived body counts in our psychology. Mental processes of motiva- tion, emotion, and cognition, along with the actions they en- gender, are not products of a split-off physical and cultural world, nor are they the products of a split-off world of genes and a central nervous systems, nor the products of some ad- ditive combination of biology and culture. Mind and actions grow from the embodied person constantly engaged in the world. It is this embodied person that both creates world meaning and is created by the meaning of the world. Embod- iment makes our psychological meanings about the world intelligible and hence explains these meanings. Embodied processes and action, so conceived, form a bridge between biological and sociocultural systems. Person-Centered and Variable Approaches to Developmental Inquiry As a bridge concept, embodiment can be examined from a biological, a cultural, or a person standpoint. Operating within a relational metatheory, each standpoint on embodi- ment is complementary to and supports the others (see Fig- ures 1.6 and 1.7). However, for purposes of exposition it is only possible to stand at one place at a time. Thus, the present discussion focuses from a person-centered standpoint and later brieﬂy describes embodiment from both a biological standpoint and a cultural standpoint. A person-centered approach to inquiry maintains a theo- retical and empirical focus on the psychological processes and patterns of psychological processes as these explain the individual’s activities in the world (see Figure 1.7). Perhaps SOCIOCULTURAL & PHYSICAL WORLD Expressive/Constitutive ACTIONS Instrumental ACTIONS LIVING BODY EMBODIMENT INQUIRY FOCUS (Standpoints) A. PERSON-CENTERED B. SOCIOCULTURAL-CENTERED C. BIOLOGY-CENTERED SUB-PERSON-LEVEL AGENCY SELF-ORGANIZING ACTION SYSTEMS PERSON BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS PERSON-LEVEL COGNITION (knowing) CONATION (wishing) EMOTION (feeling) Figure 1.7 Embodied action theory: a relational approach to psychological inquiry. 34 Development Across the Life Span Figure 1.8 A variable approach to psychological inquiry. Reflections of culture and biology. (conceptualized as person factors) SOCIOCULTURAL & PHYSICAL WORLD FACTORS Instrumental Behavior INQUIRY FACTORS BIOLOGICAL FACTORS CAUSE (Correlate) (Risk factor) (Predictor) CAUSE (Correlate) (Risk factor) (Predictor) this orientation to developmental inquiry is best illustrated by contrast with what has been termed a variable approach (see Figure 1.8). In a variable approach, the focus of inquiry is not on the person, nor on the dynamic action systems that characterize the person’s functioning. In a variable approach, the focus is on biological, cultural, and individual variables; these are understood to operate as predictors, correlates, risk factors, or antecedent causes of behavior. The distinction being drawn here is similar to that described some time ago by Block (1971) and more recently elaborated by Magnusson (1998; Magnusson & Stattin, 1998). As Magnusson has suggested, from a variable approach, various individual vari- ables (e.g., child factors ) and contextual variables are under- stood as the explanatory actors in the processes being studied. From a person-centered standpoint, self-organizing dynamic action systems—which identify psychological mechanisms—operate as the main vehicles of explanation. Within the context of a relational metatheory a person- centered theoretical orientation (standpoint or point of view; Figures 1.6 and 1.7A) is as necessary to an integrated devel- opmental inquiry as is a relational socioculture-centered standpoint (Figures 1.6 and 1.7B) or a relationally considered biological-centered point of view (Figures 1.6 and 1.7C). In any given inquiry, a focus on the person, or the sociocultural (interpersonal), or the biological is a necessary focus of analysis. However, as suggested earlier, these function as complementary, not alternative competing explanations. It should also be noted in passing that variable-focused inquiry can be transformed from a split-off exclusivity to yet another necessary point of view of relationally integrated inquiry. Stated brieﬂy, developmental variable-focused inquiry aims at the prediction of events, states, and move- ments, whereas developmental person-centered inquiry aims to explain psychological processes and their transformation. There is no necessary conﬂict in these aims. They are only in conﬂict in the reductionistic case, in which one or the other is asserted as the exclusive foundational aim of inquiry. In a similar vein, it is important to recognize that the complemen- tarity here is one of aim and not one suggesting that variable inquiry is oriented to research methods and person-centered inquiry is oriented to conceptual context. Both approaches entail the translation of theory into the empirically assessable and the translation of the empirically assessable into theory. The Person-Centered Point of View Before detailing a person- or child-centered standpoint or point of view, it is worth noting some of the beneﬁts that ac- crue to taking this standpoint toward developmental inquiry. First, a person-centered standpoint rescues developmental psychology , as a psychology, from becoming a mere adjunct to biology, to culture, to discourse, to narrative, or to com- puter science. Psyche initially referenced soul and later mind, and if psychology is not to again lose its mind—as it did in the days of behaviorism—keeping the psychological person as the center of action is a necessary guard against explana- tory reduction to biology, culture, discourse, and so on. Second, a person-centered approach highlights the fact that any act can be proﬁtably understood—again in a com- plementary bipolar fashion—as both expressive-constitutive and as instrumental-adaptive. Split or dichotomous approaches—especially split-off variable approaches—lead to the illusion that acts exhibit only adaptive-instrumental functions. A person-centered approach argues that any act may also be understood as an expression of an underlying dynamic organization of cognitive, affective, and conative Embodied Development: A Relational Concept 35 meanings, and this expression operates to constitute the world as known, felt, and desired. Here, Lois Bloom’s work (Bloom, 1998; Bloom & Tinker, 2001) on the development of language provides an excellent illustration of the power of conceptualizing language acquisition in the context of the expression of person-centered cognitive, affective, and conative-motivational meanings, rather than exclusively as an instrumental tool operating solely for communicative ends. A third beneﬁt derived from a person-centered point of view is that it provides the necessary context for the resolu- tion of certain important problems related to our general understanding of psychological meaning. Speciﬁcally, a person-centered approach is a necessary frame for solving the so-called symbol-grounding problem. This is the question of how to explain that representational items (e.g., a symbol, an image) come to have psychological meaning (Bickhard, 1993; Smythe, 1992). I return to this problem in a more detailed fashion later in this chapter. With these examples of some of the beneﬁts of a child- or person-centered approach to developmental inquiry as back- ground, it is possible to turn to a speciﬁc description of this approach. A detailed speciﬁcation of a person-centered ap- proach to developmental inquiry requires the description of four critical interwoven concepts: person, agent, action, and embodiment. Person-Agent Person and agent are complementary Escherian levels of analysis of the same whole (see Figure 1.7). The person level is constituted by genuine psychological concepts (e.g., thoughts, feelings, desires, wishes) that have intentional qualities, are open to interpretation, and are available to con- sciousness (Shanon, 1993); or in other words, have psycho- logical meaning. The agent level—called the subpersonal level by some (Dennett, 1987; Russell, 1996)—here refers to action systems or dynamic self-organizing systems. Schemes, operations, ego, attachment behavioral system, and executive function are some of the concepts that describe these action systems. Taken as a whole, the person-agent forms the nucleus of a psychological theory of mind. And in this context mind is deﬁned as a self-organizing dynamic system of cognitive (knowings, beliefs), emotional (feelings), and conative or motivational (wishes, desires) meanings or understandings, along with procedures for maintaining, implementing, and changing these meanings. It is important to note and under- line that a person-centered theory of mind is not an encapsu- lated cognition, but rather a theory that includes emotions, wishes, and desires, as well as cognition. Further, there is no question about where mind is located. Mind emerges from a relational biosociocultural activity matrix. In the present con- text, mind is a person-centered concept because the approach being described takes the person standpoint. As a person- centered concept, mind bridges naturally to both the biologi- cal and the sociocultural. Action, Intention, Behavior, and Experience Person-agency is the source of action. At the agent level, action is deﬁned as the characteristic functioning of any dynamic self-organizing system. For example, a plant orients itself towards the sun. Weather systems form high and low pressure areas and move from west to east. Human systems organize and adapt to their biological and sociocultural worlds. At the person level, action is deﬁned as intentional activity. Action is often distinguishable from behavior, be- cause the action of the person-agent implies a transformation in the intended object of action, whereas behavior often sim- ply implies movement and states (von Wright, 1971, p. 199). Thus, when the infant chews (action)—something that from a sociocultural standpoint is called a basket—the infant, from a person-centered standpoint, is transforming this part of his or her known world into a practical action chewable. Through the intentional act the person projects meaning onto the world. Action serves at least three major functions in the devel- opment of mind (see Figure 1.1). First, action expresses cognitive-affective-conative meaning. Here, it is important to recognize that the concept meaning itself has a bipolar relational status (Overton, 1994b). “I mean” and “it means” operate in a relational matrix. The former is concerned with person-centered meanings, the latter with sociocultural meanings and reference. From a person-centered standpoint, the focus of analysis is on “I mean” and secondarily on how “I mean” comes to hook up with “it means.” Considered in its expressive moment, action entails the projection of person- centered meanings, thus transforming the objective environ- mental world (i.e., an object point of view) into an actual world as known, felt, and desired. The second function that action serves is the instrumental function of communicating and adjusting person-centered meanings. Communication, dialogue, discourse, and problem solving all call attention to the relational to-and-fro move- ment between the expression of the self-organizing system and instrumental adaptive changes. Completely adapted action (i.e., successful) entails only projection. Partially adapted (i.e., partially successful) action results in ex- ploratory action, or variations . Exploratory action that is 36 Development Across the Life Span adaptive leads to reorganization of the system (transforma- tional change) and hence leads to new meanings. This general cycle of projected action and exploratory variational action as the accommodation to encountered re- sistances (see Figure 1.1) constitutes the third and most gen- eral function of action: Action deﬁnes the general mechanism of all psychological development. From a person-centered developmental action standpoint, all development is ex- plained by action. However, action is also identiﬁed with experience. But caution is necessary here because experi- ence, like meaning and other basic terms, is itself a bipolar relational concept. From a person-centered perspective, experience is the person-agent action of observing, manipu- lating, and exploring. From a sociocultural and ‘objective’ environmental point of view, experience is often identiﬁed as an event or stimulus that is independent of the person and im- poses on or is imposed on the person. For purposes of clarity it would better to retain the former action deﬁnition as expe- rience and to redeﬁne the latter as opportunity for experience. Similarly, it should be pointed out that when experience is described as a feeling, the reference here is the person- centered felt meaning of the observational, manipulative, and explorational action. In deﬁning experience as the developmental action cycle of projecting and transforming the known world while exploring the known world and transforming the system, experience also becomes the psychological bridge between biological and sociocultural systems. There is no sense here of an isolated, cut-off, solitary human psyche. Person- centered experience emerges from a biosociocultural rela- tional activity matrix (e.g., see Gallese, 2000a, 2000b), and this experience both transforms the matrix and is transformed by the matrix. Person development is neither a split-off na- tivism, nor a split-off environmentalism, nor a split-off addi- tive combination of the two. The neonate is a dynamic system of practical action meanings. These meanings represent the outcome of 9 months of the interpenetrating action (Tobach & Greenberg, 1984) of biology-environment, and this inter- penetration stretches all the way down to DNA (Gottlieb, 1997; Lewontin, 1991, 2000). Person Development Psychological development of the person-agent entails the epigenetic stance that novel forms emerge through the inter- penetrating actions of the system under investigation and the resistances the system encounters in the actual environmental world. It is through interpenetrating actions that the system changes and hence becomes differentiated. But differentia- tion of parts implies a novel coordination of parts and this coordination itself identiﬁes the emergence of novelty. Thus, for example, the neurological action system becomes differ- entiated through the interpenetrating actions of neurological- environmental functioning. This differentiation leads to a novel coordination or reorganization that constitutes the adapted level of conscious practical action found in the neonate. Consciousness is a systemic property of this emer- gent action system. The initial adapted practical conscious- ness entails a minimum awareness of the meaning entailed by an act (Zelazo, 1996). Consciousness cannot be reduced to or squeezed, so to speak, out of lower stages; it is the result of a transformation. Similarly, further developmental differentia- tions and coordinations of actions—described as higher lev- els of consciousness—emerge through the interpenetrations of conscious action and the sociocultural and physical worlds it encounters (Figure 1.1). Symbolic meaning and the sym- bolic representational level of meanings (Mueller & Overton, 1998a, 1998b) describes forms of consciousness that arise from the coordination of practical actions; reﬂective and trans-reﬂective (reﬂective symbolic understandings of reﬂec- tive symbolic understandings) meanings describe further developmental advances in the coordination of action systems. To summarize, to this point I have described the nucleus of a relationally informed person-centered developmental theory of mind, whereby mind is deﬁned as a dynamic self- organizing system of meanings that through projection transforms the world as known and through exploration transforms itself (i.e., develops). However, this remains a nucleus and only a nucleus, because it lacks the critical necessary feature of embodiment. Embodiment As discussed earlier, embodiment is the claim that our per- ception, thinking, feelings, desires—that is, the way we experience or live the world—is contextualized by being an active agent with this particular kind of body (Taylor, 1995). In other words, the kind of body we have is a precondition for the kind of experiences and meanings that we generate. At the agent level, embodiment speciﬁes the characteris- tic activity of any living system. At the person level, embod- iment afﬁrms that—from the beginning—intentionality is a feature of bodily acts (Margolis, 1987). Intentionality is not limited to a symbolic, a reﬂective, or a trans-reﬂective system of psychological meanings. Intentionality also extends to a system of psychological meanings that characterize practical embodied actions operating at the most minimum level of consciousness. Thus, psychological meanings are as charac- teristic of the neonate as they are of the adult person. This Embodied Development: A Relational Concept 37 in fact solves the symbol-grounding problem described earlier—that is, the explanation for how actual world repre- sentational items (e.g., a symbol, an image) come to have psychological meaning resides in the fact that psychological meanings, in the form of practical embodied actions, are pre- sent from the beginning. As these become transformed and coordinated, they become available to conventional symbols provided by the sociocultural world. Embodiment makes our psychological meanings about the world intelligible and hence explains our meanings. Embod- ied action, so conceived, forms a person-agent bridge be- tween biological and sociocultural systems. Support for the claim that embodiment is central to the explanation of psy- chological meaning, central to a person-centered develop- mental action theory of mind, and central as a relational bridge between the several points of view is found in empiri- cal and theoretical work being done from the biological, the cultural, and the person standpoints. The remainder of this chapter reviews some of this evidence. Embodiment and Biology. If we ﬁrst consider the bio- logical standpoint of the biology-person-socioculture rela- tional matrix (see Figure 1.7C), it is apparent that biology is increasingly taking embodiment seriously. For example, neurobiologists such as Gerald Edelman (1992), Antonio Damasio (1994, 1999), and Joseph LeDoux (1996) all argue that the cognitive-affective-motivational meanings that con- stitute mind can no longer be thought of as merely a func- tionalist piece of software or even merely a function of brain processes, but must be considered in a fully embodied context (see also Gallese, 2000a, 2000b). As Damasio says, “mind is probably not conceivable without some sort of embodiment” (1994, p. 234). Damasio (1994) comments further on contemporary per- spectives on mind: This is Descartes’error: the abyssal separation between body and mind. . . . The Cartesian idea of a disembodied mind may well have been the source, by the middle of the twentieth century, for the metaphor of mind as software program. . . . [and] there may be some Cartesian disembodiment also behind the thinking of neuroscientists who insist that the mind can be fully explained in terms of brain events, leaving by the wayside the rest of the or- ganism and the surrounding physical and social environment— and also leaving out the fact that part of the environment is itself a product of the organism’s preceding actions. (pp. 249–251) Similarly, Edelman argues that The mind is embodied. It is necessarily the case that certain dic- tates of the body must be followed by the mind. . . . Symbols do not get assigned meanings by formal means; instead it is as- sumed that symbolic structures are meaningful to begin with. This is so because categories are determined by bodily structure and by adaptive use as a result of evolution and behavior. (p. 239) Embodiment and the Socioculture Context. On the sociocultural side of the biology-person-socioculture rela- tional matrix (see Figure 1.7B), social constructivists such as Harre (1995) and Sampson (1996) have increasingly em- braced embodied action as a relational anchoring to the rela- tivism of split-off discourse analysis. Sampson, for example, argues for “embodied discourses” as these “refer to the inher- ently embodied nature of all human endeavor, including talk, conversation and discourse itself” (p. 609). Csordas (1999) approaches culture and embodiment from an anthropological position. Perhaps the most fully articulated contemporary employment of embodiment in a developmentally oriented cultural psychology is found in the work of the German psy- chologist Ernest E. Boesch (1991). Boesch’s presentation of “the I and the body” is a discussion of the centrality of em- bodiment for a cultural psychology. Thus, he states that “the body, obviously, is more than just an object with anatomical and physiological properties: it is the medium of our actions [italics added], it is with our body that we both conceive and perform actions” (p. 312). Embodiment and the Person. From the person- centered center of the biology-person-socioculture matrix (see Figure 1.7A), Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) have sketched a general outline for an embodied theory of cognition. Sheets-Johnstone (1990) provides an evolutionary anthropological perspective on human embodiment and thought, and Santostefano (1995) has detailed the emotional and cognitive dimensions of practical, symbolic, and reﬂec- tive embodied meanings. Further, many who have studied psychopathology, from R. D. Laing (1960) to Donald Winnicott (1971) and Thomas Ogden (1986), argue that disruptions in the embodied actions of the person-agent are central to an understanding of the development of severe forms of psychopathology. At the level of practical actions, Bermudez’s (1998) recent work on the development of self-consciousness is central to an understanding of the impact of an embodied person con- ceptualization. Bermudez’s fundamental argument is that late-emerging forms of meaning found in symbolic and re- ﬂective consciousness develop from—and are constrained by—embodied self-organizing action systems available to the infant. Most important is that these early systems entail person-level somatic proprioception and exteroception. As 38 Development Across the Life Span these

bundet

person-centered processes interpenetrate the physical and sociocultural worlds, proprioception operates as the differentiation mechanism for the emergence of a self- consciousness action system, and exteroception operates as the differentiation mechanism for the emergence of an object-consciousness system. Hence, over the ﬁrst several months of life, a basic practical action associated with me and other develops, which in turn becomes transformed into the symbolic me and other of early toddlerhood. Thelen’s (2000) work on the role of movement generally, and speciﬁcally “body memory” in infant cognitive functioning is another closely related area that illustrates the importance of embod- iment at the level of practical actions. Langer’s (1994) empirical studies represent important demonstrations of the intercoordination of embodied action systems as these intercoordinations move development from the practical to the symbolic plane of meaning. Earlier work by Held and his colleagues (e.g., Held & Bossom, 1961; Held & Hein, 1958), on the other hand, illustrates the signiﬁcance of voluntary embodied action at all levels of adaptation. Acredolo’s research (e.g.,Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1993) on the use of bodily gestures as signs expressing practical mean- ings in older infants suggests the expressive and instrumental value of embodied practical gesture. Other work has elabo- rated on the signiﬁcance of bodily representations at the sym- bolic and reﬂective levels of meaning. For example, while the use of ﬁngers for counting is well documented (Gelman & Williams, 1998), Saxe’s (1981, 1995) research has shown cross-culturally that other bodily representations enter into counting systems. Further, earlier research by Overton and Jackson (1973) and more recently by Kovacs and Overton (2001) has demonstrated that bodily gestures support emerg- ing symbolic representations at least until the level of reﬂec- tive meanings. At the level of symbolic, reﬂective, and trans-reﬂective conceptual functioning, the writings of Lakoff and Johnson (1999; see also Lakoff, 1987) are well known for their detailed exploration of the signiﬁcance of embodiment. For Lakoff and Johnson, embodiment provides the fundamental metaphors that shape meanings at all levels of functioning. In a parallel but distinct approach, Kainz (1988) has described how the basic laws of ordinary logic (i.e., the law of identity, the law of contradictions, and the law of the excluded middle) can be understood as emerging from the early embodied dif- ferentiation of self and other. Finally, Liben’s (1999) work on the development of the child’s symbolic and reﬂective spatial understanding presents a strong argument for an understand- ing of this development in the context of an embodied child rather than in the context of the disembodied eye that tradi- tionally has framed this domain. CONCLUSIONS This chapter has explored background ideas that ground, con- strain, and sustain theories and methods in psychology generally and developmental psychology speciﬁcally. An un- derstanding of these backgrounds presents the investigator with a rich set of concepts for the construction and assess- ment of psychological theories. An understanding of back- ground ideas also helps to prevent conceptual confusions that may ultimately lead to unproductive theories and unproduc- tive methods of empirical inquiry. The importance of this function has recently been forcefully articulated by Robert Hogan (2001) who in an article entitled “Wittgenstein Was Right” notes with approval Wittgenstein’s (1958) remark that “in psychology there are empirical methods and conceptual confusions” (p. 27), and then goes on to say that Our training and core practices concern research methods; the discipline is . . . deeply skeptical of philosophy. 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CHAPTER 2 Applied Developmental Science DONALD WERTLIEB 43 DEFINING APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 43 ELEMENTS OF THE HISTORY OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 45 DOMAINS OF INQUIRY AND ACTION IN APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 47 Parenting and Early Child Care and Education 48 Developmental Psychopathology and Developmental Assets 49 SPECIAL METHODS AND ETHICAL IMPERATIVES OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 54 CONCLUSIONS 56 REFERENCES 56 Developmental psychology’s emergent identity as an ap- plied developmental science (ADS) reflects our discipline’s rich and complex history and forecasts our discipline’s chal- lenges and opportunities as we begin our second century of science and practice. As proponents of a key subdiscipline of psychology, we continue our commitment to advance psychology “as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare” (American Psychological Association, 2000, p. 1) and to “promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, and the improvement of human welfare” (American Psychological Society, 2000, p. 1). Fulfilling this commitment involves heeding the recent call of a Nobel Foundation symposium for better integrated models of life-span development and for interdisciplinary and international frameworks (Cairns, 1998; Magnusson, 1996). This chapter provides a brief history of the emergence, or re-emergence, of ADS as a compelling umbrella for advancing developmental psychology, with a particular focus on the first two decades of life, namely, child and adolescent psychology. Consistent with the interdiscipli- nary and multidisciplinary mandates, consideration of the kindred disciplines that partner to advance knowledge follows. Examples of substantive areas of inquiry and action in ADS are then considered, including articulation of the special methods of ADS, the special ethical impera- tives of ADS, and some particular training challenges for ADS. DEFINING APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE Over the last two decades increasing numbers of develop- mental psychologists have identiﬁed themselves profession- ally as applied developmental scientists. Joining them under this umbrella are colleagues from allied disciplines and spe- cialties in the biological, social, and behavioral sciences and the helping professions, all sharing common goals and vi- sions captured in some of the more formal deﬁnitions of the ADS ﬁelds. Certainly an early milestone in the staking out of the ﬁeld’s territory occurred with the founding of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in 1980, an interna- tional multidisciplinary life-span journal. The masthead pro- claimed a “forum for communication between researchers and practitioners working in life-span human development ﬁelds, a forum for the presentation of the conceptual, methodological, policy, and related issues involved in the ap- plication of behavioral science research in developmental psychology to social action and social problem solving” (Sigel & Cocking, 1980, p. i). In welcoming the new journal in an inaugural editorial, Zigler (1980) narrowed the deﬁni- tion of the journal’s purview to what he called a “ﬁeld within a ﬁeld” (i.e., presumably, applied developmental psychology within developmental psychology) but set high and broad expectations that “these pages shall attest to the synergistic relationship between basic and applied research” (p. 1). Almost 20 years later, Zigler (1998) issued a similar note of hope, celebration, and welcome in a signiﬁcant essay called “A Place of Value for Applied and Policy Studies,” this 44 Applied Developmental Science time in the pages of Child Development, the prestigious archival journal of the Society for Research in Child Devel- opment (SRCD). Child Development had been singularly de- voted to “theory-driven, basic research. Now, after more than six decades of advancing science as a means to expand our understanding of human development, SRCD has formally welcomed into its major journal research that uses this knowledge on children’s behal f… the result of a very gradual transformation within SRCD from a scientist’s sci- ence toward a more public science” (Zigler, 1998, p. 532). The continuing vicissitudes of the gaps and synergies be- tween applied and basic research will be a theme of the his- torical sketch offered in the next section (see also Garner, 1972). In 1991 a National Task Force on Applied Developmental Science convened representatives from abroad, but not an ex- haustive range of professional scientiﬁc organizations con- cerned with the application of the knowledge base of developmental psychology to societal problems. Organiza- tions represented included the American Psychological Asso- ciation, the Gerontological Society of America, the International Society for Infant Studies, the National Black Child Development Institute, the National Council on Family Relations, the Society for Research on Adolescence, and the Society for Research in Child Development. Goals included the articulation of the deﬁnition and scope of ADS along with guidelines for graduate training in this emergent, interdisci- plinary ﬁeld. A consensus process produced a complex four- point deﬁnition of ADS, quoted here at length to document the current parameters of content, process, methods, and values: 1.1 Applied developmental science involves the programmatic synthesis of research and applications to describe, explain, intervene, and provide preventive and enhancing uses of knowledge about human development. The conceptual base of ADS reﬂects the view that individual and family func- tioning is a combined and interactive product of biology and the physical and social environments that continuously evolve and change over time. ADS emphasizes the nature of reciprocal person-environment interactions among people, across settings, and within a multidisciplinary approach stressing individual and cultural diversity. This orientation is deﬁned by three conjoint emphases: Applied: Direct implications for what individuals, families, practitioners, and policymakers do. Developmental: Systematic and successive changes within human systems that occur across the life span. Science: Grounded in a range of research methods de- signed to collect reliable and objective information system- atically that can be used to test the validity of theory and application. 1.2 ADS recognizes that valid applications of our knowl- edge of human development depend upon scientiﬁcally based understanding of multilevel normative and atypical processes that continually change and emerge over the life cycle. 1.3 ADS reﬂects an integration of perspectives from relevant biological, social, and behavioral sciences disciplines in the service of promoting development in various populations. 1.4 The nature of work in ADS is reciprocal in that science dri- ves application and application drives science. ADS empha- sizes the bidirectional relationship between those who generate empirically based knowledge about developmental phenomena and those who pursue professional practices, services, and policies that affect the well-being of mem- bers of society. Accordingly, research and theory guide intervention strategies, and evaluations of outcomes of de- velopmental interventions provide the basis for the reformu- lation of theory and for modiﬁcation of future interventions. (Fisher et al., 1993, pp. 4–5) By 1997 these parameters deﬁning ADS were adopted as the editorial scope of a new journal, Applied Developmental Science, with further explication of a more inclusive range of methodologies and audiences. The journal publishes research employing any of a diverse array of methodologies— multivariate longitudinal studies, demographic analyses, eva- luation research, intensive measurement studies, ethnographic analyses, laboratory experiments, analyses of policy and/or policy-engagement studies, or animal comparative studies— when they have important implications for the application of developmental science across the life span. Manuscripts perti- nent to the diversity of development throughout the life-span— cross-national and cross-cultural studies; systematic studies of psychopathology; and studies pertinent to gender, ethnic and racial diversity–—are particularly welcome. . . . [The audience in- cludes] developmental, clinical, school, counseling, aging, educa- tional, and community psychologists; lifecourse, family and demographic sociologists; health professionals; family and con- sumerscientists; human evolutionand ecological biologists; [and] practitioners in child and youth governmental and nongovern- mental organizations. (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 1997, p. 1) This ampliﬁed deﬁnition of ADS postulates a number of hall- marks of ADS key to the discussion of its history, content, and special concerns. Among these hallmarks are 1. A historical context and perspective reﬂecting the peren- nial balancing of related constructs such as basic and ap- plied research or science and practice or knowledge generation and utilization. This includes a sensitivity to historical and sociopolitical contexts captured in the notion of ADS as Elements of the History of Applied Developmental Science 45 Scholarship for our times. . . . As we enter the 21st century, there is growing recognition that traditional and artiﬁcial distinctions between science and service and between knowledge generation and knowledge application need to be reconceptualized if soci- ety is to successfully address the harrowing developmental se- quelae of the social, economic, and geo-political legacies of the 20th century. Scholars, practitioners and policymakers are in- creasingly recognizing the role that developmental science can play in stemming the tide of life-chance destruction caused by poverty, premature births, school failure, child abuse, crime, adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, unemployment, welfare dependency, discrimination, ethnic conﬂict, and inadequate health and social resources. (Lerner et al., 1997, p. 2) 2. A broadened and deepened awareness of the ethical chal- lenges and imperatives involved in implementing the scope of ADS. This awareness evolves from challenges in the use of scientiﬁc methods in new ways such that pro- tection of the autonomy and well-being research of par- ticipants is increasingly complex. Research participants become partners in the inquiry process and new, more complicated collaborations among diverse multidiscipli- nary professionals and communities become key elements of deﬁning research questions and problems and seeking answers and solutions. More recently, some leaders have broadened the potential scope of ADS even further, suggesting elements of a blue- print for promoting civil society and social justice, a provoca- tive and compelling elaboration of both the substance and the ethical orientation of the ﬁeld (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000). Others have focused on more traditional academic or incremental stocktaking for deﬁning ADS with attention to advancing the numerous knowledge bases and methodolo- gies (e.g., Schwebel, Plumert, & Pick, 2000; Shonkoff, 2000; Sigel & Renninger, 1998). ADS is now considered an “estab- lished discipline” (Fisher, Murray, & Sigel, 1996), deﬁned with the parameters just outlined. Our survey of this disci- pline moves now to a more detailed historical analysis, with attention to earlier roots as well as appreciation for the con- temporary ferment evident in the deﬁnitional emergence of the last few years. ELEMENTS OF THE HISTORY OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE From the earliest days of psychology in general and of devel- opmental psychology in particular, tensions and balances basic to the emergence of contemporary ADS as just deﬁned have provided the heat and light for historians of the ﬁeld. Observers and analysts are prone to calling upon metaphors such as a swinging pendulum or old wine in new bottles. In- deed, as argued elsewhere, the newness of the ADS orienta- tion “ought not be overemphasized—renewal is perhaps a more accurate frame” (Wertlieb & Feldman, 1996, p. 123). As the deﬁnition of ADS just noted emerged, Parke’s (1992) Presidential Address to the American Psychological Associa- tion Division of Developmental Psychology noted the return of developmental psychologists to “their forerunners’ con- cern for applying science to social problems . . . , and their re- newed interest in interdisciplinary work also resembles early developmental psychology” (p. 987). Parke noted that “the applied/nonapplied distinction is an increasingly blurry and perhaps dubious one, as researchers continue to recognize the multifaceted value of social experiments such as Headstart” (p. 987). Our forerunners were perhaps even bolder in asserting such views. When discussing the case of a chronic bad speller referred to his clinic, Witmer (1907), a founder of clinical psychology, noted that “if psychology was worth anything to me or to others it should be able to assist the efforts of a teacher in a retarded case of this kind. The ﬁnal test of the value of what is called science is its applicability” (cited in Fagan, 1992, p. 237). Indeed, an elemental challenge in ADS today is overcoming the historical quagmires of scientism versus clinicalism (Perry, 1979) and applied versus scientiﬁc acceptability. As evident at psychology’s inception, Fagan (1992) reported that “both Hall and Witmer were popular with teacher and parent constituencies, but not always with psychologist colleagues, many of whom viewed their work as less than scientiﬁc” (p. 239). Several extensive histories of the disciplines of develop- mental psychology and child development have been pub- lished, and most include reference to the ebb and ﬂow of interest and priority for what might be termed the applied, practical, or societally oriented issues so central to ADS. Especially relevant are discussions offered by Bronfenbren- ner, Kessel, Kessen, and White (1986); Cairns (1998); Davidson and Benjamin (1987); Hetherington (1998); McCall (1996); McCall and Groark (2000); Parke, Ornstein, Reiser, and Zahn-Waxler (1994); Sears (1975); and Siegel and White (1982). Hetherington (1998) framed her analysis by accenting her use of the term “developmental science . . . to emphasize both the scientiﬁc and multidisciplinary foun- dations of the study of development and the recognition that development is not conﬁned to childhood but extends across the lifespan” (p. 93)—emphases lost or diluted in using the too-limiting term child psychology. She interpreted and extended Sears’s (1975) classic analysis, reafﬁrming that “unlike many areas in psychology [with their histories 46 Applied Developmental Science documented by Boring (1950) and Koch & Leary (1985)], developmental science originated from the need to solve practical problems and evolved from pressure to improve the education, health, welfare and legal status of children and their families” (p. 93). The chronology of developmental psychology offered by Cairns (1998) serves as a useful framework in which to spec- ify some of the distinctive or seminal elements of ADS. Cairns delimited the emergence of developmental psychol- ogy (1882–1912), the middle period of institutionalization and expansion (1913–1946), and the modern era (1947– 1976). His compliance with a convention that 20 years must elapse before qualifying as “historical” leaves much of the signiﬁcant milestone material mentioned in our earlier deﬁn- ition of ADS outside the realm of his presentation, but he did conclude his account with a clarion call for more integrated interdisciplinary science, quite consistent with what we might term the postmodern or contemporary era (1977–pre- sent). Indeed, it is from this most recent period that we draw our substantive examples of ADS, after the conclusion of this historical sketch. Most accounts, including Cairn’s (1998) emergence anal- ysis, portray the dialectic at the base of ADS as pioneered by G. Stanley Hall, the ﬁrst professor of psychology in America (appointed in 1883 at Johns Hopkins University), the ﬁrst president of the American Psychological Association (1891), and founder of the ﬁrst child development research insti- tute (at Clark University) and of the journal Pedagogical Seminary. Hall was a remarkable teacher and catalyst for the ﬁeld. Some of the most signiﬁcant areas for developmental study—mental test- ing, child study, early education, adolescence, life-span psychol- ogy, evolutionary inﬂuences on development—were stimulated or anticipated by Hall. Because of shortcomings in the methods he employed and the theory he endorsed, few investigators stepped forward to claim Hall as a scientiﬁc mentor. His reach exceeded his grasp in the plan to apply the principles of the new science to society. Psychology’s principles were too modest, and society’s problems too large. Perhaps we should use a fresh accounting to judge Hall’s contributions, one that takes into ac- count the multiple facets of his inﬂuence on individuals, the dis- cipline, and society. The audit would reveal that all of us who aspire to better the lot of children and adolescents can claim him as a mentor. (Cairns, 1998, p. 43) White (1992) asserted that the simple fact is that G. Stanley Hall marched away from exper- imental psychology toward the study of children because at least six different constituencies existed in American society, basically still our constituencies today—scientists, college administrators, child savers and social workers, mental health workers, teachers, and parents. These constituencies wanted certain kinds of knowl- edge about children. Mirabile dictu, without even being develop- mental psychologists and before we came into existence, they were all collecting data that look like ours. So if you look at the social history that surrounds the birth of the Child Study Move- ment, you gradually come to the conclusion that perhaps we rep- resent a professionalization of trends of knowledge gathering and knowledge analysis that existed in our society before our coming. That doesn’t completely detach us from the mainstream of the history of psychology, but it certainly throws a very differ- ent light on the emergence and evolution of the ﬁeld and its basic issues. (Bronfenbrenner et al., 1986, p. 1221) Among Hall’s most signiﬁcant contributions, according to White (1992), were the concern with descriptions of children in their natural contexts and the need “to arrive at a scientiﬁc synthesis on the one side and practical recommendations on the other” (cited in Cairns, 1998, p. 43). Contemporary ADS continues in its value in the former and aspires to overcome the too-dichotomous implications of the latter; it emphasizes the reciprocal and mutual interactions of the scientiﬁc and practical typical in this earliest era. The other heroes or giants of history contributing in this foundational period are, of course, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Binet, and John Dewey. Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and methods were key forerunners of one of contemporary ADS’s most vital arenas, developmental psychopathology. The sep- arate path taken by psychoanalysis in subsequent years is only recently reconverging with developmental psychology. Millennium analyses of the ﬁeld of developmental psy- chopathology are intriguing sources of elaboration of the history of ADS, and the reawakened appreciation of psycho- analytic approaches are of special interest (Cicchetti & Sroufe, 2000; Fonagy & Target, 2000). The measurement and testing of intelligence pioneered by Binet continues to inﬂuence extant theories and methods in contemporary ADS, although certainly the scientiﬁc revolu- tions in the ensuing years (e.g., Piagetian psychology), as well as political sensitivities, establish a much more complex and sophisticated set of theories about intelligences, their mani- festation and measurement, and their places in a broad array of processes, competencies, or outcomes relevant to develop- mental status or progress. The abiding links to schooling and education, so basic to the philosophical and scientiﬁc contri- butions of John Dewey, remain core foci in contemporary ADS. Notions of constructivism, of the salience of motivation and everyday experience, and of psychology as a founda- tional science for applications such as education championed by Dewey pervade contemporary ADS (Cahan, 1992). Domains of Inquiry and Action in Applied Developmental Science 47 The second and third periods of Cairn’s (1998) history of developmental psychology emphasize institutionalization, especially of scientiﬁc and laboratory-based inquiry, and ex- pansion into a modern behavioral science. Many of the scien- tiﬁc and applied seeds planted in the foundational period grew in the middle of the twentieth century, with what we might term the rise and fall of the then-grand theories being an especially salient process. These grand theories included the elaboration of Freudian psychoanalytic approaches, be- haviorism as espoused by Skinnerians and Pavlovians, as well as cognitive theories of Piagetians. Modernism and pos- itivism yielded to postmodernism with the articulations and fragmentations captured by labels such as ego-analytic or neo-Freudian approaches; social-behavioral, social-learning, and cognitive-behavioral approaches; or neo-Piagetian ap- proaches, for example. Bronfenbrenner et al. (1986, p. 1219) described and decried dimensions of this fragmentation process in the middle of the twentieth century, identifying a trend of what they term recurring faddism or, worse, recur- rent scientiﬁc bias. The contemporary era in which ADS is now emerging capitalizes on newly grand theoretical formulations. For in- stance, bioecological theory (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994), developmental contextualism (Lerner, 1998), and life- span developmental psychology (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998) each represent varying degrees of broaden- ing and integrating (or even reintegrating) consistent with the scope and challenges of ADS. It is useful to consider a his- torical process somewhat akin to Werner’s orthogenetic prin- ciple: “Basic and applied aspects of developmental science began as a global unit and became increasingly differenti- ated. Further maturity now allows for a hierarchical integra- tion of the specialized functions into a synergistic whole” (Zigler, 1998, pp. 533–534). Substantive challenges or demands inherent in American social policy during the “Great Renaissance” of the 1960s and 1970s (the modern era according to Cairns, 1998) provided the raison d’être for ADS. The War on Poverty, Head Start early education intervention, and the community mental health movements all provided arenas for expecta- tions and conversations between developmental scientists and the society in which they functioned. The newly grand theories were required to guide the generation of research questions, data, interpretation, and application. ADS is pro- viding parameters for advancing with simultaneous and in- creasingly integrated attention to processes of knowledge generation and knowledge utilization. As noted earlier, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are key hallmarks of ADS. Not surprisingly, parallel histori- cal evolution in related subdisciplines and disciplines has been documented such that among the component ﬁelds or contemporary renditions of ADS are several emergent inte- grating or synergizing traditions. This trend has been dis- cussed in kindred subdisciplines of psychology such as clinical psychology (Fox, 1982; Frank, 1984; Kendall, 1984; Levy, 1984; Wertlieb, 1985), community psychology (Marsella, 1998; Masterpasqu, 1981), school psychology (Fagan, 1992, 2000; Ysseldyke, 1982), educational psychol- ogy (Bardon, 1983), and pediatric psychology (Brennemann, 1933; Wertlieb, 1999). Other social sciences such as anthro- pology, policy analysis, social work, home economics/ consumer sciences, and public health share some of these el- ements of differentiation and recent reintegration in interdis- ciplinary forms consistent with ADS (e.g., Elder, 1998; Featherman & Lerner, 1985; Kaplan, 2000; Nickols, 2001; Schneiderman, Speers, Silva, Tomes, & Gentry, 2001; Winett, 1995). Within the ﬁeld of psychology, as well as in the links with kindred disciplines that form ADS, the integrated identity as a “scientist-practitioner” evolves as a basic standard or goal. A similar rubric of reﬂective practice captures the optimal functioning of a scientist-practitioner (e.g., Schon, 1983). Cultivation of the scientist-practitioner remains an abiding challenge (Belar & Perry, 1992). This bridge between science and practice is requires constant attention, as documented by Kanfer’s (1990) articulation of the challenges “to foster and blend the skills, perceptivity and pragmatism of the profes- sional along with training in methods, and exposure to the skeptic-empirical attitude of the researcher” (p. 269). Applied developmental scientists are “translators who a) devote sys- tematic attention to research and dissemination of practical implications and methods derived from various domains of the social sciences and/or b) formulate professional problems in ‘basic science’ language and collaborate with (or act as) scientists whose expertise encompasses the domain in which these researchable questions are phrased” (p. 265). With deﬁnitions of ADS in hand, along with historically signiﬁcant elements that continue to shape the ﬁeld, we turn to a selec- tive overview of contemporary domains of inquiry and action in ADS. DOMAINS OF INQUIRY AND ACTION IN APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE At the start of the twenty-ﬁrst century, scores of applied de- velopmental scientists are actively and productively pursuing hundreds of signiﬁcant research questions with important im- plications and applications to the well-being of children, youth, and families. Table 2.1 lists many of these topics of 48 Applied Developmental Science TABLE 2.1 Areas of Inquiry and Action in Applied Developmental Science Topic Sample Study or Review Early child care & education Lamb (1998); Ramey & Ramey (1998); Scarr (1998); Zigler & Finn-Stevenson (1999). Early childhood education Elkind (2002). Education reform & schooling Adelman & Taylor (2000); Fishman (1999); Renninger (1998); Strauss (1998). Literacy Adams, Trieman, & Pressley (1998); Lerner, Wolf, Schliemann, & Mistry (2001). Parenting & parent education Collins et al. (2000); Cowan et al. (1998). Poverty Black & Krishnakumar (1998); McLoyd (1998). Developmental assets Benson (1997); Scales & Leffert (1999); Weissberg & Greenberg (1998). Successful children & families Masten & Coatsworth (1998); Wertlieb (2001). Marital disruption & divorce Hetherington, Bridges, & Insabella (1998); Wertlieb (1997). Developmental psychopathology Cicchetti & Sroufe (2000); Cicchetti & Toth (1998b); Richters (1997); Rutter & Sroufe (2000). Depression Cicchetti & Toth (1998a). Domestic violence & maltreatment Emery & Laumann-Billings (1998). Adolescent pregnancy Coley & Chase-Landsdale (1998). Aggression & violence Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber (1998). Children’s eyewitness reports Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke (1998). Pediatric psychology Bearison (1998). Mass media, television, & computers Huston & Wright (1998); Martland & Rothbaum (1999). Prevention science Coie et al. (1993); Kaplan (2000). inquiry and action to provide a sense of the broad scope of ADS. Recent textbooks (e.g., Fisher & Lerner, 1994), review chapters (e.g., Zigler & Finn-Stevenson, 1999), handbooks (e.g., Lerner, Jacobs & Wertlieb, 2002; Sigel & Renninger, 1998), special issues of journals (e.g., Hetherington, 1998), and regular sections of journals such as the “Applied Devel- opmental Theory” section of Infants and Young Children pro- vide ongoing articulation of ADS inquiry. Journals such as the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Applied Developmental Science, and Children’s Services: Social Pol- icy, Research and Practice are among the central outlets for new work in ADS. Each of the chapters that follow in the pre- sent volume on developmental psychology reﬂects, to vary- ing degrees, some inﬂuence of ADS in establishing the current state of knowledge, and the ﬁnal section of this vol- ume includes several chapters speciﬁcally focused on ADS- related scholarship across the life span. For the purposes of this chapter’s overview of ADS, just two of the many areas of inquiry and action have been selected to illustrate some of the substantive concerns of ADS: (a) parenting and early child care and education, followed by (b) developmental psy- chopathology and developmental assets. As will be evident, each of these complex areas involves foci of theoretical and methodological concerns, and most link to several of the oth- ers listed in Table 2.1, consistent with the highly contextual and interdisciplinary orientation of ADS. Parenting and Early Child Care and Education The state of ADS in parenting and early child care education is well summarized in several reviews (e.g., Bornstein, 1995; Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000; Cowan, Powell, & Cowan, 1998; Harris, 1998, 2000; Scarr, 1998; Vandell, 2000; Zigler & Finn-Stevenson, 1999) and covers core questions such as 1. How do parenting behaviors inﬂuence a child’s behavior and development? 2. How do children inﬂuence parenting behavior? 3. What are the inﬂuences of different forms of child care and early education on children’s development? 4. How effective are different interventions for parent educa- tion and early education of young children? 5. How do social policies inﬂuence the qualities of interven- tions and programs for children and parents? Political, philosophical, and scientiﬁc controversies per- meate many discussions of parenting and early child care and education. In recent years, as challenges to what had become conventional wisdom about the salience of parents’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors as shapers of their children’s develop- ment (e.g., Harris, 1998) gained notoriety, applied develop- mental scientists have acknowledged the shortcomings of extant socialization research (see chapter by Kerr, Stattin, & Ferrer-Wreder in this volume). “Early researchers often over- stated conclusions from correlational ﬁndings; relied exces- sively on singular, deterministic views of parental inﬂuence; and failed to attend to the potentially confounding effects of biological variation” (Collins et al., 2000, p. 218). Now, with augmented behavior-genetic designs, longitudinal analyses, animal comparative studies, more sophisticated data collec- tion, and analyses and grounding in more comprehensive and contextual biopsychosocial ecological theories, researchers offer more valid and sophisticated accounts of the important Domains of Inquiry and Action in Applied Developmental Science 49 inﬂuences of parenting on behavior. These accounts are highly nuanced with emphasis on interaction and moderator effects, reciprocal inﬂuences, nonfamilial inﬂuences, and at- tention to impacts of macrocontexts such as neighborhoods, policies, and cultures. As an example, consider the studies of children’s tempera- ments and parenting reviewed by Collins et al. (2000). Chil- dren can be characterized in terms of constitutionally based individual differences or styles of reacting to the environment and self-regulating. Developmental research had established modest statistical correlations between “difﬁcult” tempera- mental proﬁles in young children and later behavior prob- lems and disorders. Bates, Pettit, and Dodge (1995), in a longitudinal study, found that infants’ characteristics (e.g., hyperactivity, impulsivity, and difﬁcult temperament) signiﬁcantly predicted externalizing problems 10 years later. Although this ﬁnding at ﬁrst seems to support the lasting effects of physiologically based characteris- tics, Bates et al. (1995) also showed that predictive power in- creased when they added information about parenting to the equation. Infants’ early characteristics elicited harsh parenting at age 4, which in turn predicted externalizing problems when the children were young adolescents, over and above the prediction from infant temperament. Similarly, this and other ﬁndings imply that even though parenting behavior is inﬂuenced by child behavior, parents’ actions contribute distinctively to the child’s later behavior. (Collins et al., 2000, p. 222) Coupled with the increasingly sophisticated literature on the development and effectiveness of intervention programs that help parents alter their parenting behavior with infants, young children, or adolescents (e.g., Cowan et al., 1998; Webster-Stratton, 1994), this area of scholarship is a proto- typical domain of inquiry and action for ADS, and one that provides theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions. When care by other than the child’s parents is examined, similar advances are evident (Lamb, 1998, 2000; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, 2000; Scarr, 1998; Zigler & Finn-Stevenson, 1999). Again, these advances are in the con- text of political, philosophical, and scientiﬁc controversies. The last quarter century has seen a shift away from research aimed at documenting how much damage is done to children who are left in daycare as their mothers enter the work force, to research discovering and describing varieties and qualities of day care and early education experiences for children, and more recently to sophisticated longitudinal studies compar- ing and contrasting varieties of maternal and nonmaternal care, including in-home, family-based, and center-based care. These latter studies increasingly include “not only prox- imal inﬂuences on the child but distal inﬂuences as well” (Scarr, 1998, p. 101) and adopt conceptual frameworks re- quiring attention to individual differences in children, in fam- ily processes, and contextual issues such as staff training and support, access to care, and related social policies. Attention to the special needs of at-risk populations such as children living in poverty or other disadvantaged conditions shows similarly increasing sophistication as ADS frameworks are employed (e.g., Ramey & Ramey, 1998). Lamb’s (1998) summary of the current state of knowledge on child care reﬂects the orientation of ADS: In general, the quality of care received both at home and in alter- native care facilities appears to be important, whereas the speciﬁc type of care (exclusive home care, family day care, center day care) appears to be much less signiﬁcant than was once thought. Poor quality care may be experienced by many children …and poor quality care can have harmful effects on child development. Type of care may also have varying effects depending upon the ages at which children enter out-of-home care settings, with the planned curricula of day care centers becoming increasingly ad- vantageous as children get older. Interactions between the type of care and the age of the child must obviously be considered, although claims about the formative importance of the amount of nonparental care and the age of onset have yet to be substantiated empirically. It also appears likely that different children will be affected differently by various day care experiences, although we remain ignorant about most of the factors that modulate these dif- ferent effects. Child temperament, parental attitudes and values, preenrollment differences in sociability, curiosity and cognitive functioning, sex and birth order may all be inﬂuential, but reli- able evidence is scanty ….We know that extended exposure to nonparental child care indeed has a variety of effects on children, but when asked about speciﬁc patterns of effects or even whether such care is good or bad for children we still have to say It depends. (pp. 116–117) Such an analysis of the state of our science becomes a start- ing point for the ADS professional in pursuing the collabora- tions with researchers from allied disciplines and community partners to advance knowledge and build and evaluate programs. Developmental Psychopathology and Developmental Assets In fostering synergy among disciplines concerned with the understanding and well-being of children, ADS provides a forum for signiﬁcant scientiﬁc cross-fertilization between two powerful new traditions of inquiry and action: develop- mental psychopathology and developmental assets. An early 50 Applied Developmental Science deﬁnition of the science of developmental psychopathology called it “the study of the origins and course of individual patterns of behavioral maladaptation, whatever the age of onset, whatever the causes, whatever the transformations in behavioral manifestation, and however complex the course of the developmental pattern may be” (Sroufe & Rutter, 1984, p. 18). Cicchetti and Toth (1998b) conﬁrmed that developmental psychopathologists should investigate function- ing through the assessment of ontogenetic, genetic, biochemical, biological, physiological, societal, cultural, environmental, fam- ily, cognitive, social-cognitive, linguistic, representational, and socioemotional inﬂuences on behavior. . . . The ﬁeld of devel- opmental psychopathology transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. . . . Rather than competing with existing theories and facts, the developmental psychopathology perspective provides a broad integrative perspective within which the contributions of separate disciplines can be fully realized. . . . The developmental psychopathology framework may challenge assumptions about what constitutes health or pathology and may redeﬁne the man- ner in which the mental health

bundet

community operationalizes, as- sesses, classiﬁes, communicates about, and treats the adjustment problems and functioning impairments of infants, children, ado- lescents, and adults. . . . Thus, its own potential contribution lies in the heuristic power it holds for translating facts into knowl- edge, understanding and practical application. (p. 482) As society grasps the challenges and the costs of mental disorder and behavior dysfunction, only a multidisciplinary vision so broad and so bold, with attendant reliance on the newly grand theories noted earlier, especially developmental contextualism and bioecological theory, can sufﬁce. And even with this breadth and boldness evident in developmen- tal psychopathology, vulnerability to the critique of its being illness oriented or deﬁcit oriented limits its scope. Richters’s (1997) critique of developmental psychopathology identiﬁes dilemmas and a “distorted lens” (p. 193) that hamper re- search advances. ADS provides a support for the bridges needed by developmental psychopathology by linking to the complementary concepts and methods of the developmental assets approach. When contemporary clinical psychologists or clinical-developmental psychologists (Noam, 1998), for instance, who are increasingly comfortable in claiming their role as developmental psychopathologists, can collaborate with community psychologists, for instance, who are increas- ingly comfortable in cultivating developmental assets, ADS approaches its promise as a framework for understanding and addressing the needs of children in our society. The developmental assets framework (Benson, Leffert, Scales, & Blyth, 1998; Scales & Leffert, 1999) has some of its roots and branches in developmental psychopathology but contributes its own heuristic power to ADS, especially in grafting its roots and branches in community psychology and prevention science (e.g., Weissberg & Greenberg, 1998). Although developmental psychopathology may focus more often on outcomes reﬂecting health and behavior problems or mental disorders or illness, the developmental assets frame- work emphasizes outcomes (or even processes) such as com- petence or thriving, as captured in the “emerging line of inquiry and practice commonly called positive youth devel- opment” (Benson et al., 1998, p. 141; see also Pittman & Irby, 1996). ADS emphasizes the importance of simultaneous consideration of both orientations. In addition, whereas de- velopmental psychopathology is explicitly life-span oriented as noted in the deﬁnitions stated earlier, the developmental assets framework, at least to date, is more focused (in deriva- tion though not implication) on the processes boldest in the second decade of life. The empirical and theoretical foun- dations for the framework emphasize “three types of health outcomes: a) the prevention of high risk behaviors (e.g., sub- stance use, violence, sexual intercourse, school dropout); b) the enhancement of thriving outcomes (e.g., school suc- cess, afﬁrmation of diversity, the proactive approach to nutri- tion and exercise); and c) resiliency, or the capacity to rebound in the face of adversity” (p. 143). Developmental assets theory generates research models that call upon a system or catalog of 40 developmental assets, half of them internal (e.g., commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity) and half of them external (e.g., support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time). Assessments of these characteristics and processes in individuals and in com- munities then provide for problem deﬁnition, intervention design, and program evaluation. While the developmental psychopathologist might focus on similar constructs and word them only in a negative or deﬁcit manner (e.g., a posi- tive identity is merely the opposite of poor self-esteem), simultaneous consideration of both the assets and psy- chopathology orientations reveals that beyond the overlap- ping or synonymous concept or measure are complementing and augmenting meanings with important implications for both research and practice. Some features of the synergy obtained with the perspec- tives fostered by developmental psychopathology and devel- opmental assets orientations are evident in theory and research conducted in frameworks termed the stress and coping paradigm (e.g., Wertlieb, Jacobson, & Hauser, 1990), or vulnerability/risk and resiliency/protective factors model (e.g., Ackerman, Schoff, Levinson, Youngstrom, & Izard, 1999; Hauser, Vieyra, Jacobson, & Wertlieb, 1985; Jes- sor, Turbin & Costa, 1998; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Luthar & Zigler, 1991; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). Domains of Inquiry and Action in Applied Developmental Science 51 To illustrate some dimensions of this synergy that are basic to advancing ADS, we offer an overview of the stress and cop- ing paradigm. The Stress and Coping Paradigm An important step toward the integration of emergent ap- proaches to developmental psychopathology and extant stress theories salient to both health and mental health researchers was taken about 20 years ago at a gathering of scholars at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Attendants generated what at the time was a com- prehensive state-of-the-art review and compelling research agenda published as Stress, Coping, and Development in Children (Garmezy & Rutter, 1983). At a reunion a decade later, many of the same scientists and their younger col- leagues now pursuing the agenda took stock of the research to produce Stress, Risk, and Resilience in Children and Ado- lescents (Haggerty, Sherrod, Garmezy, & Rutter, 1994). This latter volume was especially impressive in its articulation of important interventions and prevention applications, reﬂect- ing the historical trend noted earlier to be fueling ADS. A comparison of the two titles reveals that the coping construct disappeared—an unfortunate decision in light of present con- cerns with the promises of coping interventions and develop- mental assets as elements of overcoming stress, risk, and poor health outcomes. However, the second title did intro- duce core biomedical and epidemiological constructs of risk and resiliency, basic conceptual and methodological tools consistent with ADS as deﬁned earlier. In any event, these volumes provide a comprehensive treatment of the stress and coping ﬁeld as an ADS. Figure 2.1 is a simple schematic that illustrates some basic features. The stress and coping paradigm depicted in Figure 2.1 juxtaposes four variable domains capturing the complex and dynamic stress process (Pearlin, 1989) as a slice in time and context. The dimensions of time, or developmental progres- sion, and context are those noted earlier as the bioecological framework (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994) and life-course models (e.g., Clausen, 1995; Elder, 1995); they are the back- ground and foreground absent from, but implicit in, the schematic in Figure 2.1. A common critique of stress research focuses on the circularity of some of its constructs and rea- soning. For instance, consider a stressful life event such as the hospitalization of a child and the necessity to consider it both as a stressor in the life of the child and his family and as an outcome of a stress process. As ADS evolves with its more sophisticated longitudinal and nonlinear analytic methodolo- gies, these critiques will be less compelling. For the moment and for the sake of this brief description of the paradigm, a circular form with multiple dual-direction arrows is adopted. The reciprocity of inﬂuences and the transactional qualities Figure 2.1 The stress and coping paradigm. COPING PROCESSES • appraisal focus • problem-solving focus • emotion management focus COPING RESOURCES/ MODERATORS • social support • “intelligence” • “personality” • socioeconomic status OUTCOMES • health • illness • adaptation STRESS • developmental • major life event • hassles • chronic 52 Applied Developmental Science of relationships among and across domains are signaled by both the intersections of the quadrants and the dual-directed arrows around the circumference. Consideration of each quadrant should convey the substance and form of this devel- opmental stress and coping paradigm and the way it calls upon key variables in developmental psychopathology and developmental assets orientations. Beginning with the stress quadrant, reference is made to the types of stress that are familiar in the literature and have documented developmental and health consequences. For in- stance, each child encounters biological, psychological, and social milestones and transitions. Examples include the tod- dler’s ﬁrst steps, kindergartners entering school, teenagers entering puberty, and young people marrying. These are the developmental stressors, or transitional life events, of devel- opment. Traditional psychosomatic medicine as well as contempo- rary health psychology and behavioral medicine have fo- cused most heavily on health consequences of major life events. Among these are normative experiences such as en- tering high school or starting a new job, nonnormative events such as the death of a parent during childhood or getting arrested, and events that do not ﬁt classiﬁcation by normative life course transitions. Thus, being diagnosed with a serious chronic illness or undergoing a divorce are examples of non- normative event changes. The horserace between major life events such as these and, in turn, what are termed hassles, or the microstressors of everyday life—efforts to quantify one type or the other as more strongly related to particular health outcomes—has been a feature of recent research in develop- mental psychopathology. This work teaches us the impor- tance of avoiding overly simple variable-centered strategies and striving to capture the richness of conceptualizations that link, for instance, chronic role strain and acute life events, be they major or quotidian (Eckenrode & Gore, 1994; Pearlin, 1989). Notions of chronic stressors allow for consideration of a relatively vast child development literature on the adverse impacts of, for example, poverty (e.g., McLoyd, 1998). The distinction between chronic and acute stressors also serves applied developmental scientists when they can differentiate variables and processes in an acute experience. Thus, for in- stance, receiving a diagnosis of a chronic illness, such as dia- betes, may be considered an acutely stressful event, whereas living with diabetes may be viewed as a chronic stressor (Wertlieb et al., 1990). Health consequences associated with these stressors ap- pear in the outcomes quadrant of Figure 2.1. Highlighted here are a commitment to multidimensional and multivariate assessments of health outcomes; an appreciation of both physical and mental health indexes, acknowledging both interdependence and unity; an emphasis on a balance among assets, health, and competence indexes; and a context of health as a part of a broader biopsychosocial adaptation. In traditional terms, ADS is concerned with the health and mental health of individuals. In contemporary terms, the health of developmental systems and communities must also be indexed. For decades, it was these two domains—stressors and outcomes—that alone constituted the ﬁeld of stress research. Consistent, reliable, and useful relationships were docu- mented conﬁrming the stress and illness correlation. Across scores of studies, statistically consistent relationships on the order of .30 were obtained and replicated. Thus, we could consistently account for close to 10% of the variance shared by stress and health—scientiﬁcally compelling, but hardly enough given the magnitude of the decisions that health care providers and policy makers must make. Using the ADS framework, stress and coping researchers pursue a quest for the other 90% of the variance. The expansions and differenti- ations of stressor types exempliﬁed in the stress quadrant of Figure 2.1 contribute to the cause. In addition, it is the incor- poration of the other two quadrants—coping processes and coping resources/moderators—that are the keys to achieving the goal. As these variables are incorporated into our models, explanatory and predictive power increases, and the quest for the other 90% advances. The present model employs a speciﬁc conceptualization and assessment methodology for coping processes as ad- vanced by Lazarus and Folkman (1984) and adapted for chil- dren by Wertlieb, Weigel, and Feldstein (1987). This model emphasizes three types or dimensions of coping behavior ex- hibited by children as well as adults. A focus on the appraisal process, the problem-solving process, or the emotion- management process can be distinguished and measured in the transactions between an individual and the environment as stress is encountered and as developmental or health con- sequences unfold. Other researchers have employed similar or competing coping theories, and many, perhaps most, are consistent with the broader stress and coping paradigm pre- sented here (e.g., Aldwin, 1994; Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council, 1996; Bonner & Finney, 1996; Compas, 1987; Fiese & Sameroff, 1989; Luthar & Zigler, 1991; Pellegrini, 1990; Sorensen, 1993; Stokols, 1992; Wallander & Varni, 1992; Wills & Filer, 1996). Similarly, there is a wide range of coping resources/ moderators investigated in the literature, and Figure 2.1 se- lects a few examples to illustrate the range and demon- strate the relevance to the developmental psychopathology and developmental assets domains of ADS. Many of the Domains of Inquiry and Action in Applied Developmental Science 53 40 elements of the developmental assets framework reﬂect various dimensions of social support (e.g., family support, a caring school climate, a religious community, or school en- gagement). A large and complicated literature documents the manners in which social support in its diverse forms inﬂu- ences the relationships between health and illness. Key dis- criminations of pathways for such inﬂuences in terms of main effects, interactions, buffering effects, and mediation or mod- eration are elaborated in these studies (Cohen & Syme, 1985; Sarason, Sarason, & Pierce, 1990). Similarly complex, and even controversial, are formulations that call upon constructs and measures of intelligence or cognitive capacities or styles, as resources, moderators, or mediators of the stress-health re- lationship (Garmezy, 1994; Goleman, 1995). Diverse ranges of personality variables have also been employed in this work, including biologically oriented notions of tempera- ment and psychological control orientations (Wertlieb, Weigel, & Feldstein, 1989). Socioeconomic status (SES) is depicted in this resource quadrant, reminding us of the problem of redundancy and cir- cularity. In the earlier description of types of stress I noted the manner in which poverty—a level or type of SES—could be modeled. Here, whether the SES is conceived as a factor that psychological researchers too often relegate to the status of background variable in a multivariate model or as a factor that sociologists might emphasize in a social structural analy- sis, its elements are crucial pieces of the contemporary con- text for the stress-health linkage. Again, the general stress and coping model in Figure 2.1 can accommodate consider- able diversity in this coping resources/moderators domain; success in the quest will reﬂect the achievement of simplicity and parsimony. A speciﬁc composite case example from our research pro- gram in pediatric psychology, or child health psychology, will serve to show the stress and coping paradigm in action. Again, the ADS framework orients us to signiﬁcant demands for both knowledge generation and knowledge utilization in this example of a child’s development, where understanding as well as application in terms of health care intervention and social policy are intertwined (Wertlieb, 1999). The example of Jason Royton involves each of the four domains shown in Figure 2.1. Twelve-year-old Jason Royton was rushed to the pediatric hospital emergency room by his distraught father the morn- ing after a vociferous battle in their home about whether Jason will get to see the R-rated movies that he contends all his friends are allowed to see. Within hours, the pediatrician emerges with the diagnosis: insulin-dependent diabetes mel- litus (IDDM). In this scenario, the applied developmental sci- entist can quickly document multiple interacting dimensions of stress that potentially impinge on the child: the acute trauma of the health emergency and diagnosis, the parallel stress of the separation and autonomy struggle in the Roytons’ lives, the onset of a chronic stressor of living with a life-threatening illness, and the initiation of multiple series of hassles or quotidian stressors associated with the precise reg- imen of diet, insulin injection, exercise, and medical care. Also immediate are the coping processes and a mélange of challenges and responses—shock, grief, denial, anxiety, ap- praisal (sizing up the nature of the challenges), problem solv- ing (assessing and marshaling resources to comprehend and meet these challenges)—and for each individual, as well as for the family system, managing the feelings, threats, and disequilibria now introduced into their lives. Inﬂuences of coping resources/moderators can be recog- nized as well. Mobilization of social support is part of the problem-solving process as we see Jason’s grandmother arriving on the scene once they return home. Caring for the other two Royton children will be only a minor worry for Mr. and Mrs. Royton as they get through these initial days of their new status as a family with IDDM. Less minor and more sur- prising is the extent to which some of the protection offered by their comfortable middle-class lifestyle does not turn out to be what they thought it was. Clarifying their beneﬁts and expenses in their new managed health care plan conﬁrms that health insurance is not what it once was. IDDM, too, is not what it once was. Several decades ago, prior to the 1922 in- troduction of insulin therapy, the diagnosis was a death sen- tence. Now, people living with IDDM are part of a large group enjoying productive lives and pioneering novel chal- lenges. The hope for ever-greater advances in biomedical sci- ence and technology is part of that life; a cure for IDDM, or a prevention, is an active research area. Jason, meanwhile, is having his various “intelligences” challenged as his health care team launches him on an educa- tion for life with IDDM. Processing complex biomedical and psychosocial information, shifting notions of future threats and complications in and out of awareness, and anticipating how to live with this difference, especially when being dif- ferent, has little cachet in a young adolescent’s social circles. These stressors are moderated and will unfold as elements of the multidimensional health outcomes proﬁle that must be considered in assessing the current or future health of a youngster with IDDM. Most immediate health outcomes focus on maintaining healthy blood glucose levels and some optimal adherence with the medical regimen. Psychological dimensions of accommodation of psychosocial strivings for autonomy and consolidation of a positive sense of compe- tence and self-worth are related developmental processes. Undoubtedly, this set of experiences for Jason and his family 54 Applied Developmental Science engages the applied developmental scientist in an array of conceptual and methodological endeavors guided by frame- works of developmental psychopathology and develop- mental assets. (A more detailed consideration of IDDM in a stress and coping paradigm can be found in Wertlieb et al., 1990; a comprehensive survey of pediatric psychology is offered by Bearison, 1998.) In elaborating the stress and coping paradigm as an exam- ple of an ADS heuristic, a key point to be made is that al- though any science can be described by mapping its domains of inquiry, to describe ADS, one must map domains of in- quiry and action. The synergy and cross-fertilization between inquiry and action are core processes in advancing the ADS ﬁeld. For instance, in the stress and coping paradigm example, note that each quadrant includes variables that are amenable to some range of intervention, inﬂuence, or change. Families, health or social service professionals, communities, or public policies may be among the instigators or agents of such changes. Stressors of various types can be reduced, modiﬁed, or ameliorated by individual actions or shifts in public policies. Coping processes can be taught or modi- ﬁed. Resources and moderators can be introduced, altered, strengthened, or weakened. Outcomes can be changed. The design and evaluation of such change processes constitutes key elements of ADS. These foci involve a number of special methods as well as ethical imperatives. SPECIAL METHODS AND ETHICAL IMPERATIVES OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE Having sketched key historical and deﬁnitional parameters of ADS and having sampled a few of the many substantive do- mains of inquiry and action in ADS, this section shifts to con- sideration of some of the special research methods of and ethical issues in ADS. As evident in the sampling of inquiry domains, the ADS parameters are addressed only to a certain extent by traditional research methods and designs. Ac- knowledgment of the conceptual complexity imposed by the relevant developmental contextual and bioecological theo- ries engages increasingly sophisticated methodological ap- proaches. Orchestration of a researcher’s perspectives on a set of problems with a society’s perspectives on the problems—be they concerns about how to provide a type of care for children or how to sustain the health and develop- ment of an ill child, as considered in this sampling—requires extension and innovation by the applied developmental scientist. Some of the extension and innovation is relatively incremental. For example, study of children’s adaptation to illness becomes the province of interdisciplinary teams of endocrinologists, pediatric psychologists, nurses, and child psychiatrists. Bolder innovation advances ADS when fami- lies and communities are recognized and embraced as legiti- mate partners in the research enterprise, when the audience or “consumer” of research is broadened to include service providers and policy makers, and when traditional institu- tional structures and functions associated with the ivory tower of the university are challenged or modiﬁed. A leading perspective in capturing these extensions and innovations is termed outreach scholarship (Chibucos & Lerner, 1999; Lerner & Miller, 1998). Jensen,Hoagwood, andTrickett (1999) contrastuniversity- based research traditionally supported by the National Institute of Health in an efﬁcacy model with an outreach model that reﬂects emergent approaches to research consistent with the parameters of ADS and basic to advancement in the numerous domains of inquiry and action listed in Table 2.1. Outreach research or outreach scholarship characterizes the “engaged university” (Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Colleges, 1999) more so than the tradi- tional ivory tower university (e.g., McCall, Groark, Strauss, & Johnson, 1995). In outreach scholarship, knowledge advances as a function of collaborations and partnerships between universities and communities such that the scientists and the children, families, and communities that they seek to under- stand and to help are deﬁning problems, methods, and solu- tions together. Communities include policy makers as well as the families and service providers who both implement and consume interventions and programs. Lerner et al. (2000) properly noted that this involves a “sea change in the way scholars conduct their research” (p. 14) and then noted the principles of outreach scholarship that characterize these special collaborations and methods in ADS. These principles include the following: (1) an enhanced focus on external validity, on the pertinence of the research to the actual ecology of human development . . . as opposed to contrived, albeit well-designed, laboratory type stud- ies; (2) incorporating the values and needs of community collab- orators within research activities; (3) full conceptualization and assessment of outcomes, that is, a commitment to understanding thoroughly both the direct and indirect effects of a research- based intervention program on youth and their context and to measuring these outcomes; (4) ﬂexibility to ﬁt local needs and circumstances, that is, an orientation to adjust the design or pro- cedures . . . to the vicissitudes of the community within which the work is enacted; (5) accordingly, a willingness to make mod- iﬁcations to research methods in order to ﬁt the circumstances of the local community; and (6) the embracing of long term per- spectives, that is, the commitment of the university to remain in the community for a time period sufﬁcient to see the realization Special Methods and Ethical Imperatives of Applied Developmental Science 55 of community-valued developmental goals for its youth. . . . [In addition, these principles include] co-learning (between two ex- pert systems—the community and the university); humility on the part of the university and its faculty, so that true co-learning and collaboration among equals can occur; and cultural integra- tion, so that both the university and the community can appreci- ate each other’s perspective. (Lerner et al., 2000, p. 14, italics added) As articulated in the deﬁnitional parameters of ADS that opened this chapter and as reﬂected in the speciﬁc examples of inquiry and action, the extensions and innovations in- volved in outreach scholarship provide a means to address the conceptual and methodological challenges inherent in attending to the synergy and advancement of science and practice. Along with these tools and potentials comes a series of ethical imperatives reﬂecting responsibilities of both re- searchers and practitioners. These complex challenges have been a central concern to ADS from its earliest contemporary renditions, and the frameworks offered by Fisher and Tryon (1990) continue to serve well as an agenda. Fisher and Tryon (1990) noted that along with the synergy and integration of research and application basic to the ad- vance of the ﬁeld, the applied developmental scientist is bound by the ethics of research, by the ethics of professional service, and by a complicated admixture that emerges with the acknowledgement of their interdependence. In addition, as the notion of outreach scholarship shifts the applied developmental scientist away from narrow and traditional notions of research subjects, patients, and clients to more appropriate notions of partners, consumers, and collabora- tors, there emerge areas as yet uncharted by the ethical stan- dards of extant disciplines and professions. Indeed, even the imperative—that ethical behavior in ADS reﬂects some con- sensus or amalgam of the applied ethics embraced over time by diverse disciplines or traditions now teaming up in any of the areas of inquiry and action noted earlier—invokes chal- lenge. Distinctive, perhaps even unique, ethical issues arise when the articulation of basic bioecological and contextual theories are parlayed into methods, measures, research de- signs, interventions, programs, and policies. Further, whether in the traditional disciplines or in emergent ADS, ethical con- siderations are encumbered and enriched by the mores and pressures of the historical context. Thus, the particular exi- gencies of our evolving multicultural and global societies that are manifested in concerns about diversity and cultural sensitivity and competence become deep and abiding con- cerns for the applied developmental scientist as she develops and tests her theories, designs and evaluates her interven- tions, provides health or social services, or engages policy makers around social programs and policies. As one example of the special ethical challenges that ADS must master, return to our consideration of the re- search on early child care and education. As noted then, the sociohistorical shift involving the entry of more women into the workforce fueled the interest and concern of both society and developmental scientists. Hoffman (1990) described the manner in which bias in the scientiﬁc process characterized much of the early research on maternal employment. Knowledge was produced and applied with an emphasis on documenting defects or deﬁcits in children left in non- parental day care. As the more sophisticated concepts and methods of ADS were engaged to address the social concern of nonparental care, there were more nuanced and accurate notions of direct and indirect effects of individual differ- ences and quality variables in home-based and center-based care settings. In addition, as dire as were some of the ethical challenges in the conduct of the science aimed at generating understanding about the impacts of different care arrange- ments, the risks involved in the communication of ﬁndings to the public and to policy makers can also be harrowing and daunting. Hoffman (1990) concluded her account with the position that whereas “there is a social responsibility to make ﬁndings available for social policy and individual de- cision, there is also a responsibility to communicate the re- sults accurately, and to educate the public about what the data can and cannot say. The tentative nature of our ﬁndings, their susceptibility to different interpretations, and the com- plications of translating them into individual or policy ac- tions must be communicated to achieve an ethical science” (p. 268). A second example to capture some of the particular ethical challenges facing ADS pertains especially to this particular historical moment where ADS is gaining recognition as an established discipline (Fisher et al., 1996). Yet, training pro- grams to produce the next generation of applied developmen- tal scientists are only just emerging. Whereas some of the root or allied disciplines may have sophisticated quality- control and credentialing procedures in place to increase the likelihood that ethical standards are met, ADS cannot borrow completely from these traditions. ADS must generate new and appropriate standards reﬂecting the exigencies of its spe- cial methods (e.g., outreach scholarship, university commu- nity partnerships) and the special expectations and demands faced by new applied developmental scientists as they pursue work in many, or any, of the domains of inquiry and action listed in Table 2.1. For instance, traditional developmental psychologists can be trained, and their allegiance to the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association (1992) can be incul- cated during their graduate training. Clinical psychologists, 56 Applied Developmental Science as another example, can be educated and held accountable both through their graduate training and later professional career in APA standards and in a variety of state and national licensing and credentialing conventions. Although applied developmental scientists now emerging from traditionally regulated ﬁelds such as clinical, school, or counseling psy- chology will have a starting point in these traditional ethical guidelines, neither they nor their colleagues from diverse disciplinary and multidisciplinary training bases are yet equipped with explicit ethical principles or credentials for the practice of ADS. Indeed, Koocher (1990) alerted the ﬁeld to this challenge a decade ago, and although the sociopolitical scene has evolved in complex ways since then, the challenge remains for ADS to attend very seri- ously to issues of graduate training and ethics commensu- rate with its appropriately broadened scope and deepened mission. CONCLUSIONS The tributary of history that was developmental psychology has joined a river that is ADS. This contemporary face of de- velopmental psychology is not really a new focus, but rather a contemporary manifestation of some of the ﬁeld’s earliest roots and priorities. As was originally the case, the under- standing of children, their development, and their needs is pursued for the intellectual bounty only in part. It is the use of this knowledge to enhance the quality of life for children that launched the discipline of developmental psychology in the late nineteenth century and that propels ADS in the early twenty-ﬁrst century. Recently emerged and sophisticated theoretical frame- works have evolved and are required to address the para- meters of ADS. In particular, bioecological theory and developmental contextual theory are useful in capturing the complexities of children’s lives over time. As society, includ- ing families, caregivers, service providers, and policy mak- ers, as well as youth themselves, convey their awareness of the needs and potentials of today’s children, applied develop- mental scientists can collaborate to generate systematic un- derstandings of how best to meet those needs and achieve those potentials. A large array of substantive areas of inquiry and action is likely to be advanced through such collabora- tion, and only a few examples were discussed in this chapter. The challenges in many of these areas are considerable— conceptually, methodologically, and ethically. 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Lamb (Eds.), Develop- mental psychology: An advanced textbook (4th ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. PART TWO INFANCY CHAPTER 3 Infant Perception and Cognition LESLIE B. COHEN AND CARA H. CASHON 65 INFANT PERCEPTION VERSUS INFANT COGNITION 66 HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS 66 MODERN TECHNIQUES FOR ASSESSING INFANT PERCEPTION AND COGNITION 66 Infant Visual Preference 66 Novelty Preferences and Habituation 67 Other Techniques 68 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 68 Piagetian Theory 68 Gibson’s Ecological Theory 69 Dynamical Systems 69 Nativism 69 Connectionist Modeling 70 Cognitive Neuroscience 70 Information Processing 70 INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF PROPERTIES OF OBJECTS 71 Form Perception 71 Color Perception 72 Perceptual Constancy 73 Constancy as a Relationship Between Features 74 INFANTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF OBJECTS 74 Object Permanence 74 Object Unity 75 Object Individuation 75 Core Knowledge About Objects 76 Face Perception 78 INFANT CATEGORIZATION 79 The Earliest Age at Which Infants Can Categorize 79 The Content of Infants’ Categories 80 Information-Processing Changes in Categorization 80 Current Trends in

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Infant Categorization Research 80 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 81 Full-Term Versus Preterm Infants 81 Infants With an Established Risk Condition 82 Predictive Validity of Habituation and Novelty Preference Measures 83 A Speciﬁc Information-Processing Explanation 83 CONCLUDING COMMENTS 84 REFERENCES 85 Research on infant perception and cognition has grown expo- nentially over the past four decades. In most respects, this explosion of research has led to spectacular advances in knowledge and appreciation of infants and their abilities. How- ever, this same growth has also led to conﬂicting theoretical views, contradictory conclusions, and even heated exchanges between investigators—all of which seem to make a coherent picture of infant perceptual and cognitive development difﬁ- cult if not impossible to achieve. One goal of this chapter is to cut through some of the extravagant claims and rhetorical arguments to examine in some detail what the evidence really indicates. We shall approach this task from an information- processing point of view by continually asking two interrelated questions: (a) How are infants actually processing the informa- tion in their environment? and (b) In what way does that processing change with age and experience? Fortunately, when one takes this approach, an organized and reasonably con- sistent picture of infant perception and cognition emerges. Furthermore, a number of domain-general propositions, such as those mentioned later in this chapter in the section on in- formation processing, seem to help to explain both infants’ information processing at a given age and how that processing develops over time. In this chapter we shall both describe these information-processing principles and—when possible—use them as a convenient tool for organizing the many ﬁndings on numerous topics within the domain of infant perception and cognition. Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by NIH grant HD-23397 to the ﬁrst author from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 66 Infant Perception and Cognition INFANT PERCEPTION VERSUS INFANT COGNITION Before discussing the ﬁndings in the area of infant perception and cognition, the ﬁrst step should be at least to make some crude attempt to deﬁne what we mean by infant perception and cognition. The reader may have noticed our tendency so far to treat infant perception and cognition as a single domain rather than as two distinct entities. Even that issue is unclear and debatable. Some, such as Mandler (1992, 2000b), overtly assume that infant perception and cognition are two distinct domains with little communication between them. Under this view, infant perception may be seen as including lower-level, automatic processes such as noticing the features of objects and responding to those features. Infant cognition, on the other hand, may be seen as involving higher-level, concep- tual processes such as making inferences about the functions or meanings of objects. Others, such as Quinn and Eimas (2000), argue that both are aspects of a single domain and that they differ more in degree than in kind. Our opinion falls closer to Quinn and Eimas’s than to Mandler’s. We also see the difference between perception and cognition to be more a matter of degree than of kind. Whether one is dealing with perceiving size constancy— perceiving the actual size of an object seen at different distances—or understanding the meaning of a complex causal event in which one object pushes another object across a table, it is the nature of the underlying relationship that must be perceived or understood. In size constancy, the un- derlying relationship is the size of one object relative to the object’s distance or to the size of other objects; in the causal event, it is the movement of one object in space and time relative to the movement of the second object. Some rela- tionships may be perceived automatically and effortlessly; others require a more active comparison. But from an infor- mation-processing perspective, they all can be understood in terms of sets of relationships. Our task is to describe the nature of these relationships and how they contribute to some overall organization or information-processing hierarchy. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS We begin by considering some historical antecedents of the current popularity of research on infant perception and cognition. Certainly interest in infants and what they can perceive and understand has existed for centuries. Classic debates by philosophers such as Locke versus Rousseau exist in modiﬁed form to this day. Biologists’ and psychologists’ biographies of their own babies, such as Teidemann, Preyer, Darwin, and Piaget, provided important insights into their infants’ reactions, although they often were less than totally objective accounts (see Kessen, 1965). More objective ex- periments on infants’responsiveness to stimulation occasion- ally appeared in the early 1900s. For example, McDougall (1908) reported ﬁnding differential infant ﬁxation times to stimuli varying in color. Blanton (1917) was one of the ﬁrst to ﬁnd that infants will pursue a moving stimulus visually, and Irwin (1941) found that changes in light intensity produced modiﬁcations in an infant’s activity. Somewhat later, in the 1950s and 1960s, studies began to appear that measured heart rate and sucking measures, as well as visual ﬁxation. Both auditory (e.g., Bridger, 1961) and olfactory (Engen, Lipsitt, Lewis, & Kaye, 1963) stimulation were found to produce changes in heart rate in newborn infants. Furthermore, these studies also showed that repeated presenta- tions of these stimuli led to habituation of the response. A group of Russian investigators (Bronshtein, Antonova, Kamentskaya, Luppova, & Sytova, 1958) presented auditory, olfactory, and visual stimuli to infants under 1 month of age. They found suppression of sucking to all three types of stimu- lation and habituation of the suppression over trials. Often in- fants were presented with repetitions of a bright light or 90 dB white noise. Many of these studies examined what Sokolov (1963) had referred to as the “orienting reﬂex,” a pattern of physiological and behavioral changes to the presentation of a novel stimulus. There were several reports that infants exhib- ited both an orienting response and a decline in that response— habituation—with repeated presentations of the same stimulus. According to Sokolov, habituation of the orienting reﬂex re- ﬂected a form of memory, a point that would be picked up in the 1970s when studies of infant memory ﬁrst became popular. These studies and many similar ones demonstrated that infants—even very young infants—were sensitive to stimula- tion from a number of modalities, and perhaps that they even had some memory of that stimulation. Yet these studies did very little to address more interesting questions about how that stimulation was processed or remembered. This may in part be due to the complexity of the methods involved; in order to con- duct these experiments, one needed rather elaborate and ex- pensive recording equipment as well as a team of investigators to monitor that equipment and the infant. MODERN TECHNIQUES FOR ASSESSING INFANT PERCEPTION AND COGNITION Infant Visual Preference Two seminal studies, conducted independently on essentially the same topic, both published in 1958, radically reduced the potential complexity of the experimental method and led to a Modern Techniques for Assessing Infant Perception and Cognition 67 dramatic change in the nature of research on infant perception and cognition. Berlyne (1958) measured the visual ﬁxations of 3- to 9-month-old infants. On each trial, two black and white checkerboard patterns that differed in brightness or complex- ity were placed on a display board in front of each infant. An observer who could not see the patterns called out the direction of gaze of the infant—a technique that allowed Berlyne to de- termine to which pattern the infant ﬁrst ﬁxated. One of Berlyne’s ﬁndings was that infants ﬁrst looked at a complex pattern, such as a checkerboard with many squares, more than at a simple pattern, such as a checkerboard with few squares. At the same time Fantz, known to many as the founder of modern research on infant perception, began a series of stud- ies (Fantz, 1958, 1961, 1963; Fantz, Ordy, & Udelf, 1962) on infants’ visual preferences. Patterns, such as checkerboards with differing numbers of squares, vertical stripes of different thicknesses, and drawings of regular versus scrambled faces were shown to infants two at a time. Fantz’s procedure was a methodological advance over Berlyne’s in that because of the placement of the infant in a testing chamber, the experimenter could actually see a reﬂection of the stimulus on the infants’ cornea. Also, Fantz measured total looking time rather than just the direction of ﬁrst look. Among Fantz’s ﬁndings were that infants tend to prefer patterned surfaces to uniform sur- faces and complex patterns to simple patterns. Both Berlyne’s and Fantz’s studies represented real ad- vances over previous research in the ﬁeld. Their innovations included demonstration of a simple, reliable, inexpensive technique for measuring infant visual attention, systematic manipulation of the stimuli presented to infants, and exami- nation of differences in the pattern of visual attention over age. Their technique capitalized on what may be considered infants’ natural preferences for some stimuli over others; it has come to be called the visual preference paradigm. The visual preference paradigm is still a very popular technique. Numerous studies by many investigators over the past 40 years have used some version of this visual prefer- ence paradigm to examine topics ranging from infant visual acuity to pattern perception, preferences for complexity, and even face perception. Several of these topics are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. Novelty Preferences and Habituation The visual preference technique works well when infants have a natural preference for certain stimuli—that is, when from the outset, infants have the tendency to look at some stimuli longer than at others. When this occurs, we can infer not only that infants have a preference for one stimulus over another, but also that infants can discriminate between those stimuli. However, many cases exist in which infants do not display an initial preference, yet investigators need to know whether the infants can discriminate between the stimuli. In such cases, investigators often rely on a paradigm that com- bines the visual preference technique with habituation. Once again, the ﬁeld is indebted to Fantz for leading the way. In 1964, Fantz reported a study in which infants were shown two magazine pictures simultaneously, side by side, and the infants’ looking times to the pictures were recorded. As trials progressed, the picture on one side remained the same, but the one on the other side changed from trial to trial. Over the course of the experiment, infants gradually came to look more and more at the side with novel pictures. This preference for novelty has become the underlying basis of the most widely used research tool for investigating infant perception and cognition—the infant visual habituation paradigm. Although many variations of this paradigm exist, a prototypical example would be to repeatedly present one vi- sual stimulus until an infant’s looking time habituates to some criterion level, such as 50% of the infant’s initial looking time. Novel and familiar test stimuli would then be presented to see if the infant looks longer at (i.e., recovers to) the novel ones. Doing so indicates that the infant can differentiate between the novel and the familiar stimuli, even though initially the infant may not have had a natural preference for one over the other. As we shall see later in this chapter, the infant visual habituation paradigm has been used for over three decades to investigate basic and esoteric questions related to infant perception, attention, memory, language acquisition, object knowledge, categorization, and concept formation. Differ- ences in habituation and recovery have been reported between normal and aberrant infants, and both habituation rates and preferences for novelty appear to be moderately correlated with later IQ. As simple and straightforward as infant preferences for novelty and habituation appear to be, the situation is actually more complicated. Many people assume that infants always have a preference for novelty. In reality, several studies have shown that a preference for familiarity often precedes a pref- erence for novelty. Furthermore, this early preference for familiarity seems to be stronger in younger infants. It is also stronger when the information-processing task is more com- plex or difﬁcult for the infant. Hunter and Ames (1988) have summarized these con- ditions. According to them, the time it takes for an infant to be familiarized to a stimulus—that is, show a novelty preference—depends upon both the age of the infant and the complexity of the stimulus. For example, the familiarity pref- erences for older infants (e.g., those over 6 months of age) should be very brief compared to those for younger infants 68 Infant Perception and Cognition (e.g., those under 6 months of age), and within an age group the familiarity preferences should vary according to stimulus complexity. The bottom line is that if younger infants are re- peatedly shown very simple stimuli—or if older infants are shown moderately complex stimuli—both groups are likely to produce the classic monotonically decreasing habituation curve. On the other hand, if infants at either age are shown dynamic moving scenes involving multiple objects, they are likely to prefer familiar scenes prior to preferring novel ones. Therefore, it becomes important in such studies to habituate all infants to a relatively stringent criterion and to include both familiar and novel stimuli at the end to test that the in- fant indeed prefers novelty. Unfortunately, many infant habit- uation studies today do not adhere to these procedures. Other Techniques Several other techniques have also been used to investigate questions related to infant perception and cognition. In some, infants play a more active role, such as crawling, walking, or reaching. In others, physiological indicators—such as heart rate or cortical evoked potentials—rather than behavioral indicators are assessed. Although some of these techniques are unrelated to visual preference and habituation, others are more related than one might ﬁrst assume. For example, infant operant conditioning is often used and has many similarities to visual habituation (e.g., Bower, 1966a). In these studies, infants are ﬁrst conditioned to respond to one stimulus and then tested with novel stimuli that vary in some systematic way from the conditioned stimulus. The logic is similar to that in habituation studies. In habituation, responses are arti- ﬁcially decreased to one stimulus. Discrimination is assessed by determining whether that decrease generalizes to other stimuli. In conditioning, responses are artiﬁcially increased to one stimulus, and discrimination is assessed by determin- ing whether that increase generalizes to other stimuli. A variety of conditioning studies have also been used to investigate infants’ perception of speech (e.g., Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971), all of which relate either to visual preferences, visual habituation, or both. Such studies have frequently used a high-amplitude sucking proce- dure in which infants ﬁrst are conditioned to suck in order to hear a sequence of speech sounds. That procedure continues until their sucking habituates, at which time the speech sounds are changed and recovery of sucking is assessed. Many more recent studies of infant speech perception and early language ability have turned to visual attention as the measure (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). For example, infants may learn to look at a speciﬁc location to hear a particular sound. Then a new sound is introduced and changes in looking time are assessed. We ﬁnd it interesting that just as in the visual perception literature, some disagreement exists as to whether the infants should look longer or shorter when a novel stimulus is presented. We cannot list all possible tech- niques that can be used to assess infant perception and cogni- tion, but as we have described, many are related either procedurally or logically to two very important techniques— infant visual preferences and visual habituation. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Several theoretical perspectives have been inﬂuential in directing research on infant perception and cognition over the past forty years. It is impossible to adequately represent any of these viewpoints in just a single chapter. Indeed, some of them require entire books to explain them adequately. Certainly Piagetian theory, Gibsonian theory, dynamical systems, and connectionist modeling fall into this category. Others are more approaches to studying infant development than they are complete theories. They make certain assump- tions and predictions and use certain research techniques to investigate those predictions, but they probably do not qual- ify as formal theories. Nativism, cognitive neuroscience, and information processing tend to fall into this category. Brief descriptions are provided in the following sections for each of these theoretical perspectives. It should be under- stood that each description is merely a cursory overview. Any real understanding requires reading much more, including the references provided with each description. Piagetian Theory The one researcher who has had the longest—and many would say the most profound—impact on the ﬁeld of infant cognition and perception is Piaget. Originally a biologist, Piaget devel- oped a theory of cognitive development by observing his own children’s behavior on certain tasks during infancy and child- hood (e.g., Piaget, 1927, 1936/1952, 1937/1954). For many years, psychologists in the United States disregarded Piaget’s theory because his research methods were considered impre- cise and his ideas about cognition were in conﬂict with the be- haviorist’s zeitgeist of the day. However, that position began to change as comprehensive reviews of Piaget’s theory be- came available in English (e.g., Flavell, 1963; Hunt, 1961).As the reader will see, the modern infant cognition researcher often uses Piaget’s theory and observations as a springboard for further ideas and research. Piaget’s (1937/1954) view of infant development is that infants develop an understanding of the world—that is, an understanding about objects, space, time, and causality—by interacting with the environment. Borrowing from the ﬁeld of Theoretical Perspectives 69 biology, Piaget (1936/1952, 1937/1954) believed that infants develop through the processes of assimilation and accom- modation. Piaget also believed that development is stagelike and discontinuous. Furthermore, the infant, according to Piaget, is as an active learner who is motivated to learn about the world; but cognitive development, like other aspects of development, represents an interaction between maturation and learning. Piaget speciﬁed four major periods corresponding to different ages of the developing child. The ﬁrst period of Piaget’s (1937/1954) theory of cognitive development, the sensorimotor period, describes infants from birth to around 18–24 months of age, or about the age that language ﬁrst appears. During this period, infants are thought to go through six stages, starting from interacting with the world strictly with innate reﬂexes (Stage 1) to using mental representations for acting on the world (Stage 6). Topics examined by Piaget include the development of infants’ understandings of time, space, causality, and the permanence of objects. Many modern developmental researchers agree with Piaget’s view that the child is an active learner, but disagree with his view that development is discontinuous, or stagelike. Theoretical positions, such as information processing and the connectionist view of development, are similar in some ways to Piaget’s view in that both emphasize the role of learning and experience to help explain developmental changes and both can be considered constructivist theories. Like Piaget, both assume that developmental change is a building-block process that starts small and gradually becomes more elabo- rate or sophisticated. Other more nativist views believe that Piaget was much too conservative about infants’ developing abilities; they claim he underestimated the ability of the in- fant. Some modern researchers believe that because Piaget’s method of research was not truly experimental, his ﬁndings were not generalizable. His ﬁndings are sometimes criticized for erroneously focusing too much on the child’s competence at a very speciﬁc task that may or may not reveal the child’s true understanding of the world (e.g., Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985; Bower, 1974). Nevertheless, Piaget is revered today by many infant cognition and perception researchers and is appreciated for his ingenuity and his insights into the mind of the infant (see Flavell, 1963). Gibson’s Ecological Theory Not all theories of development rely so much on the develop- ing mind of the infant. For example, Gibson’s ecological approach to the study of infant perceptual development places emphasis on the environment and infant’s abilities to detect important information from the world. Her view is based pri- marily on two key issues: (a) the infant’s ability to discover new affordances —ways upon which an environment lends it- self to be acted, and (b) the infant’s ability to differentiate — parse out invariant information from the world. As infants act in the world, they differentiate information in their envi- ronment and discover affordances. With this new understand- ing of the world around them, their actions in the world change. According to Gibson, perception and action are closely related for the infant, and much Gibsonian research examines that relationship (Gibson, 1995). For example, it has been found that an infant may tumble down a slope the ﬁrst couple of times he or she approaches such a surface. Soon the infant begins to understand that one affordance of the slope, compared to other surfaces, is that it may cause tumbling (Adolph, Eppler, & Gibson, 1993a). Another example is Gibson and Walk’s (1960) classic work on infants’ perception of depth, known as the “visual cliff” experiment. In this study, it was found that infants would not crawl across a table that appeared to have a drop-off, or cliff, in the middle. Gibson and Walk saw this as evidence that infants of crawl- ing age had enough experience with depth to know that it could afford danger. (For a more detailed discussion of this theory and related research, see the review by Adolph, Eppler, & Gibson, 1993b). Dynamical Systems Another theoretical view that emphasizes the close relation- ship between perception, cognition, and action is dynamical systems. In a recent set of books, Smith and Thelen (1993) and Thelen and Smith (1994) attempt to unify recent ad- vances in dynamical systems theory with research in devel- opmental neuroscience and behavioral development. They argue that development can best be understood in terms of complex nonlinear systems that are self-organizing. Devel- opmental changes tend to be described in the language of physical nonlinear systems—that is, attractor states, phase transitions, and stability versus ﬂuctuations of the system. This view, with its emphasis on mechanisms of change, is clearly opposed to nativist explanations. Although it has been applied most successfully to issues of motor development, its advocates are attempting to apply it to perceptual and cogni- tive development as well. As we shall see, it also has impor- tant elements in common with connectionist modeling. Nativism A persistent theoretical debate throughout the entire history of developmental psychology has been nativism versus empiri- cism. Nowhere is this debate more apparent than in modern- day infant perception and cognition. A chief spokesperson for 70 Infant Perception and Cognition the nativist position is Spelke. According to Spelke (1985), infants are endowed by nature with capacities to perceive and understand objects and events in the world. This core knowledge includes an understanding of partially and fully occluded objects; the ability to reason about physical proper- ties of objects, such as continuity and solidity; an under- standing of number; and knowledge of physical causality. Spelke and others, most notably Baillargeon, have argued that human infants are more competent than others (such as Piaget) had believed. To bolster their claims, they have pro- vided considerable evidence based upon ingenious variations of methods involving infant habituation and visual preference. In some of these variations, infants must not only perceive events involving one or more objects, but must also make inferences when a portion of those events is hidden behind an occluder. Needless to say, this viewpoint has been controversial. Many believe the nativist assumptions about the competen- cies of young infants are unwarranted. In fact, they question whether such assumptions can even be considered explana- tions. Recent debates on the pros and cons of nativism have appeared in the literature between Spelke (1998) versus Haith (1998) and Baillargeon (1999) versus Smith (1999). Furthermore, empirical research on some of these topics is beginning to show that simpler explanations can account for the apparent cognitive sophistication proposed by the na- tivists. Some of the research both for and against the nativist viewpoint is described in later sections of this chapter. Connectionist Modeling The connectionist modeling approach stands in sharp contrast to the nativist approach. The most complete descrip- tion of the application of connectionism to development has been published in a recent book entitled Rethinking Innate- ness (Elman et al., 1996). Whereas nativism assumes infants come prewired with certain core knowledge, connectionists reject this form of innateness. They argue that at all levels— molecular, cellular, and organismic—interactions occur be- tween organisms and the environment. A more appropriate meaning of innateness is that the outcome is constrained to some extent at each of those levels. These constraints operate on the type of representation, the architecture, and the timing of the developmental process that is being considered. Comparisons—sometimes real, sometimes metaphorical— are made between the structure of the brain and computerized connectionist networks. So, for example, just as brains in- clude neuronal synapses and speciﬁc areas, connectionist models include patterns of connections and types of units or levels. Connectionist models also include nonlinear learning rules that may lead to emergent, stagelike properties and thus are quite compatible with a dynamical systems approach. Many early models were developed to counter the prevalent nativism of linguistic theory. Modelers tried to demonstrate that what some assumed were innate rules of language could be approximated by connectionist models through experi- ence. Connectionism has spread to simulations of infant perception and cognition. New models are appearing on infant categorization (Mareschal & French, 2000), object permanence (Munakata, McClelland, Johnson, & Siegler, 1997), speech perception (Schafer & Mareschal, 2001), and rule learning (Shultz & Bale, 2001). The adequacy of these models is still being hotly debated (Marcus, 1999a, 1999b) but there is no doubt that these models are presenting a challenge to the view that infants possess innate knowledge structures. Cognitive Neuroscience Developmental neuroscience is an area that has grown substantially over the last 10 to 20 years. Like dynamical sys- tems and connectionist modeling, its users attempt to make links between development of the brain and development of behavior associated with perception and cognition. Whereas previous approaches to ties with brain development have been somewhat metaphorical, developmental neuroscientists attempt to measure brain development directly and then relate it to cognitive development. However, ﬁnding the answers to questions about brain development and cognitive develop- ment in infants is not such a straightforward business. Proce- dures that may be useful for studying the link between brain and cognition in older children may not be appropriate for studying this link in infants. For example, PET (positron- emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic reso- nance imaging) methods may work fairly well with children and adults, but these are considered too intrusive for use with infants (M. H. Johnson, 1997). The methods most often used to study the developing brain in infants are EEGs (electroen- cephalographs), ERPs (event related potentials), and animal models (for a review of studies on infant perception and at- tention, see M. H. Johnson, 1996). Information Processing The information-processing approach contains elements of some of the other approaches described previously. Like Piaget, proponents of the information-processing approach believe that perceptual and cognitive development is con- structive. According to one view, at least, the emphasis is on infants’ learning to process the relationship among properties Infants’ Perception of Properties of Objects 71 to form the whole (Cohen, 1988, 1991, 1998; Cohen & Cashon, 2001b). Young infants are able to process simple perceptual properties of objects, such as color, form, and shape, before they can process objects as a whole. As in Piagetian theory, development is also hierarchical. From an information-processing perspective, what counts as a unique whole at one age can serve as a property or element of a larger or more complex whole at an older age. Therefore, after infants perceive or organize perceptual properties into unique objects, they can treat objects themselves as proper- ties of larger wholes and look for relationships between objects in dynamic events involving multiple objects. One such relationship is causality; infants can distinguish causal, direct-launching events from noncausal events. At a later point in development, even these causal events can become elements in more elaborate event sequences. Recently this approach has been summarized by a set of six propositions (Cohen & Cashon, 2001b): 1. Perceptual-cognitive development follows a set of domain-general information-processing principles. 2. Information in the environment can be processed at a number of different levels of organization. 3. Higher (more holistic) levels can be deﬁned in terms of the types of relationships among lower (parts) levels. 4. Development involves progressing to higher and higher levels. 5. There is a bias to initiate processing at the highest level available. 6. If an information overload occurs (such as when move- ment is added or when the task involves forming a cate- gory), the optimal strategy is to fall back to a lower level of processing. Much like connectionist modeling and dynamical systems and unlike nativism, the information-processing approach emphasizes the role of experience, learning, and nonlinear changes in development. In fact, attempts are currently underway to produce a connectionist model that follows the preceding six propositions (Chaput & Cohen, 2001). Along with other approaches, visual attention and habituation are frequently used to assess infant information-processing. In contrast to other approaches, it also emphasizes changes in attention and memory over age. An information-processing perspective has often been used in studies of individual dif- ferences in preterm versus full-term infants or normal versus aberrant infants as well as long-term predictions of later intellectual ability (e.g., Bornstein & Sigman, 1986; Fagan, 1984). INFANTS’ PERCEPTION OF PROPERTIES OF OBJECTS We begin by considering three classic topics in perception that have also been studied extensively in infants—form perception, color perception, and perceptual constancies. If space permitted, we could have included many other topics that have also been investigated in infants, including the perception of sound, touch, odor, and motion. Although our selections are not exhaustive, they are representative of the type of questions being asked about infant perception and its development. They also serve as a reasonable starting point for our progression from topics that most would agree are clear examples of infant perception to topics which fall more into the category of infant cognition. Form Perception Form perception in infants is usually studied with two- dimensional or three-dimensional static ﬁgures or shapes that have well-deﬁned contours (Slater, 1995b; Slater & Johnson, 1998). The issue most often investigated in form perception is whether infants will respond to the component parts of a shape or to the ﬁgure as a whole (Slater, 1995b; Slater & Johnson, 1998). However, making this distinction experi- mentally is not always easy. For example, Slater, Morison, and Rose (1983) found that newborn infants can discriminate between the outlines of the shapes of a triangle, a square, and a cross. Is this form perception? Perhaps not. In fact, in one of the earliest form perception studies with infants, Salapatek and Kessen (1966) found that when newborns scanned a large triangle, they only scanned a small portion near the apex. To provide clear evidence of form perception, it is important to show that infants are discriminating between these shapes based upon more than just a portion of their out- lines or some other component of the ﬁgure. It also must be shown that infants process the ﬁgure as a whole.As Banks and Salapatek (1983) discussed (see also Slater, 1995b), it is very difﬁcult to obtain unambiguous evidence of form perception because there are often simpler, perceptual explanations for results with infants. Thus, even topics as basic as form perception must deal with issues about part-versus-whole processing that are central to the information-processing approach mentioned earlier. Fortunately, there are ways to examine this experimental issue. In one such study, Cohen and Younger (1984) investi- gated developmental differences in the perception of angles by 14- and 6-week-old infants and were able to get clear evidence of form perception in the older infants. Cohen and Younger (1984) tested whether infants would process the 72 Infant Perception and Cognition parts of the angle—that is, the orientations of the lines—or whether they would process the whole angle—that is, the relationship between the lines. After habituating infants to one angle, they presented variations that either changed the line orientations but not the angle, or that changed the angle but not the line orientations. Their results indicated a devel- opmental shift in the manner in which infants process angles and perhaps other simple forms. The younger infants seem only able to process the line orientations, or the independent parts of the angle, whereas the older infants are able to process the relationship between the lines and process the angle as a whole form. Slater, Mattock, Brown, and Bremner (1991) conducted a similar set of experiments with newborns. In the ﬁrst experi- ment, newborns were found to behave similarly to the younger, 6-week-old infants in the Cohen and Younger (1984) study. Not surprisingly, the newborns in the Slater et al. (1991) study responded to a change in line orientation and not to a change in the angle. In a second experiment, Slater et al. (1991) investigated whether newborns could process the angle independently of its orientation. In this ex- periment, newborns were familiarized either to an acute or an obtuse angle presented in six different orientations, much like a category study. Infants were then tested on an acute and an obtuse angle, one of which was familiar and the other novel, both in novel orientations. Slater et al. (1991) found that the newborns showed a novelty preference for the novel angle. Slater (1995b) suggested that this could be evidence of form perception in newborns, although he acknowledged that it may not be unambiguous evidence. One important alternate interpretation has been referred to as the “blob theory” (Slater et al., 1991). This interpreta- tion rests on the notion that at the apex of an angle a low- frequency “blob” is formed, and the size of the blob varies depending on the size of the angle. When newborns discrim- inated between the acute and obtuse angles in the Slater et al. (1991) test, they may have been responding to the difference in relative size of the blobs and not actually to the angle it- self. If this is the case, then the results would be consis- tent with a developmental progression in the perception of angles, whereby newborns respond to the size of the apex (the blob), 6-week-olds respond to the independent lines of an angle, and 14-week-olds respond to relationship of the lines of the angle or the form of the angle. Slater and Morison (as cited in Slater, 1995b) also found evidence for a developmental progression in form per- ception. In this experiment, newborns, 3-month-olds and 5-month-olds were tested on whether they could extract the general shape from a series of ﬁgures that varied only slightly from one another in design or texture. After being familiarized to six exemplars of a shape, infants were tested on a novel exemplar of the familiar shape and a novel shape. By showing infants slight variations of the same shape, the experimenters were able to see whether infants could form a category based on the overall form of the shape. If infants were in fact able to form this category, then one would expect infants to show a novelty preference for the novel shape. This is exactly what the 3- and 5-month-old infants did; however, the newborns did not show the preference. These results ﬁt nicely with an information-processing approach and provide further support that form perception may develop over time. Color Perception Our knowledge about infants’ color perception has grown considerably in the last 25 years (for a review, see Teller & Bornstein, 1987). Before that time, the results of research conducted on infant color perception were somewhat ambiguous. It was never clear in these early experiments whether infants were discriminating between different hues or some other aspect of color, such as brightness or intensity. In 1975, several researchers invented clever tasks to show that infants younger than 3 months of age can discriminate between stimuli that vary in hue, not just brightness. For ex- ample, Peeples and Teller (1975) tested 2-month-old infants on a hue preference test and found that they could discrimi- nate a red hue from a white hue, independent of brightness. More recently, Adams, Courage, and Mercer (1994) tested infants shortly after birth and found that newborns could discriminate red from white, but not blue, green, or yellow from white. As Kellman and Arterberry (1998) concluded, however, by about 2 to 3 months of age, infants seem to have color vision very similar to that of to adults and can discrim- inate between many colors. So, within the ﬁrst 2 to 3 months of life, infants appear to be sensitive to the same spectrum of color as adults. But do infants view the boundaries between colors in the same way as adults? Adults group a range of colors into blue and another range into green, and so on. In other words, do infants (like adults) organize colors into distinct categories? Bornstein, Kessen, and Weiskopf (1976) tested this question with 4-month-old infants. They habituated infants to a stimu- lus of a certain hue, or wavelength. Then the infants were tested with the same stimulus, a stimulus of a different wave- length but from the same color category, and a stimulus of a different wavelength that was considered by adults to be in a different category. If infants dishabituated to both novel stim- uli, one would conclude that they must have responded to the wavelength and not the color categories. However, Bornstein et al. (1976) found that infants dishabituated only to the Infants’ Perception of Properties of Objects 73 stimulus that adults considered to be in a different color cate- gory. Thus, infants not only perceive colors at an early age, they also seem to organize them into roughly the same color categories as adults. From an information-processing viewpoint, it is interest- ing that like form perception, even infants’ color perception appears to go through a developmental pattern whereby in- fants begin by processing information at a lower level, and then later they integrate that information and process it at a higher level. In the case of color perception, infants ﬁrst gain the ability to discriminate between colors (around 2–3 months of age) and then later, building upon that ability, are able categorize colors (around 4 months of age). In the next section, we examine something that looks very much like categorization with infants’ perception of shape and size constancy. Perceptual Constancy Artists are taught to be conscious of the way they see the world and to create visual illusions such as size, perspective, and distance on the canvas. For example, to create the illu- sion that an object is farther away, an artist simply draws the object higher and smaller on the page than he or she would draw an object that is meant to be up close. Similarly, adults have little difﬁculty making sense of the environment and un- derstanding the illusions created on our retina. For example, you would have no trouble recognizing this book as the same book whether you saw it inside on your desk under ﬂuores- cent lighting or outside in the bright daylight. You would not be fooled by the different perceptual characteristics of the book due to the different illuminations and would effortlessly understand that it is the same book. Furthermore, you would perceive the book as the same despite its change in location or orientation. This ability to identify an object as the same despite a perceptual transformation is known as perceptual constancy. One question that researchers have asked is whether young infants see real objects as adults do or retinal images of objects? For example, how would an infant make sense of seeing a teddy bear from across the room and then seeing the same teddy bear up close? Would the infant respond to the objective characteristics of the teddy bear and recognize the two images as the same teddy bear, or would the infant respond to the different-sized images on the retina and perceive the bears as two distinct objects, one much larger than the other? If infants perceived the two images as the same, as adults would, we would say that infants have size constancy —that is, despite the fact that the retinal image of the close teddy bear may be twice as large as the retinal image of the distant teddy bear, the objective size is still preserved. The notion of constancy can also refer to shape constancy, which is the ability to perceive an object as being the same despite changes to its orientation or slant. For example, if an infant saw a rectangular block from the frontal view and then saw it at a 45° angle, would the infant know that it was the same block? In other words, would the infant (like an adult) understand that despite the change in slant, both objects are the same rectangular block? Or would the infant perceive only the retinal image of these two objects and treat these two as different shapes, one as a rectangle and one as a trapezoid? Size Constancy Piaget and Inhelder (1969) adhered to the position that infants ﬁrst respond to the retinal images of objects and believed that infants did not get size constancy until 5 or 6 months of age. They based this belief on the ﬁnding that if one taught infants to reach for a large box, the infant would continue to reach for that box even though it projected a smaller image on the retina than did a box that was closer and smaller in real size. Bower, however, challenged the traditional view of size constancy and was one of the ﬁrst researchers to test its claims empirically. In several experiments (e.g., Bower, 1966b), he used an operant conditioning paradigm to investi- gate whether young infants based their responses to an object on that object’s real size, retinal size, or distance. Bower (1966b) found that infants generalized their response based upon both the objective size and the object’s distance, but not retinal size. Thus, he had evidence that infants younger than 2 months of age do not rely on the retinal size of objects and can respond on the basis of an object’s real size and distance. Day and McKenzie (1981) continued the work on infant size constancy using a habituation paradigm, a completely different technique from Bower’s operant conditioning experiments. They also found evidence for size constancy in infants as young as 18 weeks of age. Subsequently, two inde- pendent research laboratories tested newborns in a habitua- tion paradigm, and both found evidence of size constancy (Granrud, 1987; Slater, Mattock, & Brown, 1990). Shape Constancy In addition to studying size constancy in infants, Bower also used his operant conditioning technique to study shape constancy. In one experiment with 50- to 60-day-olds, he trained infants on a rectangle that was slanted at a 45° angle, which created a retinal image that looked like a trapezoid. 74 Infant Perception and Cognition He then looked for a generalized response to (a) a rectangle at a frontal view (new retinal image, same objective shape, new slant); (b) a trapezoid at a frontal view (same retinal image, new objective shape, new slant); and © a trapezoid slanted at a 45° angle (new retinal image, new objective shape, same slant). Bower found that infants generalized their responses to the rectangle presented at a frontal view. This result indicates that the infants responded to the objective shape of objects and not the shape of the retinal image or the slant of the objects. Caron, Caron, and Carlson (1979) also addressed the issue of shape constancy in young infants, but did so in several studies using a habituation paradigm. Their results supported Bower’s ﬁnding that young infants perceive the objective shape of objects and do not rely solely on the retinal image of those objects. In fact, in a more recent habituation study, Slater and Morison (1985) also found evidence of shape constancy in newborns. Constancy as a Relationship Between Features In sum, the evidence suggests that young infants do not rely solely on the retinal image of objects and are capable from birth (or shortly thereafter) of understanding size and shape constancy. How is it that infants are able to understand these constancies and respond to more than the retinal image of objects at birth? The key may be that all constancies require an understanding or appreciation of relational information. To return to the examples in the beginning of this section, the reason this book outdoors is not perceived as brighter is that relative to other objects, it is not brighter. Furthermore, the reason that an infant would perceive the teddy bear up close and far away as the same bear is that the size is constant relative to the distance of the object. The up close bear may appear two times as large, but it is also two times as close as the distant bear. Thus, the relationship between size and distance has remained the same. It is these constant relation- ships to which the infants must be sensitive. Being sensitive to the relationships among things in the world is a necessary requirement for understanding the world around us. From our information-processing perspective, understanding relationships is the central principle around which infant perceptual and cognitive development proceeds. Throughout this chapter, we demonstrate that as infants get older, the types of relationships they process, understand, and remember become more complex and abstract. In that sense, the abilities to understand size, shape, and other constancies become building blocks from which infants learn about ﬁrst objects and later events in the world about them. Even some types of constancies may be more cognitively demanding or require more conscious attention to relation- ships than do others. One of these constancies may be object constancy, which is an understanding that despite a signiﬁ- cant physical transformation of an object in space, time, or both, it is the same object. An example would be under- standing that the bottle now on its side but seen previously standing up is the same bottle—or recognizing the back of mother’s head is the same person who is normally seen from the front. One could go a step further. What if the object or person were not visible at all? For example, consider an infant who hears her mother’s voice in the other room and is able to identify the voice as that of his or her mother—or an infant who recognizes that the toy under the table is the same toy he or she had in hand before dropping it and losing sight of it. This extension of object constancy has been examined in great detail in the infant cognition literature by Piaget and many other investigators under the heading of object perma- nence. Because the development of an understanding about objects has played such a prominent role in investigations of infant cognition, we shall devote considerable space to it in the next section of this chapter. INFANTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF OBJECTS Object Permanence When people think about what infants know about objects, the concept of object permanence, or understanding that an object continues to exist in the world even though it is hid- den or cannot be seen, often comes to mind. There is the general misconception that infants acquire this concept at 8 or 9 months of age. The misconception arises in part because most people think of object permanence as a unitary concept that infants have or do not have at a particular age. Because one of the most dramatic developments in object permanence, reaching for and obtaining an object that is totally hidden, occurs around 8 or 9 months of age, this is when many assume infants acquire object permanence. However, for Piaget, obtaining a hidden object is only one intermediate step in a long sequence of accomplishments that infants must master during their ﬁrst 2 years of life (Piaget, 1936/1952, 1937/1954). Obtaining a completely hidden object is charac- teristic of the onset of Piaget’s Stage 4 (9 to 12 months). How- ever, infants at Stage 3 (1 and one half to 4 or 5 months), although not yet able to retrieve a completely hidden object, are able to retrieve an object that is only partially hidden. And even though infants in Stage 4 can retrieve a completely hid- den object, if an experimenter subsequently hides the object under a second cloth, infants at this stage will commit what is known as the A not B error. They will mistakenly go to the ﬁrst cloth to retrieve the object (for more discussion on the A not B error, see Diamond, 1991; and Haith & Benson, 1998). Infants’ Understanding of Objects 75 Infants at Stage 5 (12–18 months) no longer make this error and will correctly retrieve the hidden object from the correct cloth. However, according to Piaget (1937/1954), Stage 5 infants still do not completely have the concept of object permanence because they are fooled by invisible displacements. If an experimenter shows an infant an object and then places the object in a small box before hiding it under a cloth on the table, the Stage 5 infant will not look for the hidden object at its ﬁnal destination. An infant who does successfully retrieve an object under this circumstance is considered by Piaget to be in Stage 6 (18–24 months) and to have completely mastered the object concept. (For more discussion on the development of the object concept, see Diamond, 1991; and Haith & Benson, 1998) Object Unity More recent research has extended the work of Piaget and considered other questions about infants’ understanding of objects. Kellman and Spelke (1983), for example, investi- gated the role of coordinated movement of an object parts in infants’ perception of objectness, or the perception of object unity. In this classic study, they habituated 4-month-old infants to a display in which a partially occluded rod moved back and forth behind an occluder. They were then tested on two displays without the occluder. In one test, infants saw a complete rod that moved back and forth, and in the other they saw just the two rod parts that resembled portions visible during habituation. The infants dishabituated to the two rod parts but not to the solid rod, indicating to Kellman and Spelke (1983) that the parts were novel, and thus that they must have perceived the two moving parts during habituation as a single complete rod. This result, according to Kellman and Spelke, indicates that the infants perceived object unity even under conditions of partial occlusion. It is interesting to note that the perception or inference of an object under conditions of partial occlusion at 4 months of age would be consistent with Piaget’s Stage 3 behavior. It therefore would be of interest to test younger infants to see whether this ability to perceive or infer a uniﬁed object develops during the ﬁrst few months of life. Several researchers have in fact attempted to replicate this object unity study with younger infants. Slater et al. (1990) conducted a similar study with newborns and found a very different set of results from those reported by Kellman and Spelke (1983). Slater et al. found that instead of dishabituat- ing to the two rod parts, newborn infants dishabituated to the complete rod, suggesting that they were perceiving the rod parts as separate items rather than as the top and bottom of a single uniﬁed object. More recently, researchers have rep- licated Kellman and Spelke’s ﬁndings with 2-month-olds and have found that they dishabituate to the rod parts display in the test if the occluder is rather narrow (S. P. Johnson & Nañez, 1995). Collectively, research on object unity shows that infants are not born with the ability to perceive two parts of a moving, partially occluded object as one object, but that this ability develops over at least the ﬁrst 4 months of age. In fact, such a conclusion ﬁts within an information- processing framework by showing once again a developmen- tal change from processing parts to processing wholes. It seems clear from research on object unity and other related topics that well before 7 months of age, infants are capable of perceiving objectness—that is, of perceiving those character- istics that indicate a single uniﬁed object exists. From our earlier discussions on form, color, and constancy, it is equally clear that also well before 7 months of age infants perceive many characteristic features of an object. However, as re- search described in the next section indicates, young infants still lack the ability to distinguish one object from another. This ability has been called object individuation or object segregation and estimates about when it develops range widely from 4 or 5 months of age to 12 months of age. Object Individuation The ability to distinguish two objects as distinct entities is what researchers refer to as object individuation or object seg- regation. Depending on the procedure used, there are reports that infants can individuate objects at 12 but not 10 months of age (Xu & Carey, 1996), or in some cases as young as 5 months of age (Needham, 2001; Wilcox, 1999). Xu and Carey (1996) employed an “event-mapping” procedure, as it is referred to by Wilcox and Baillargeon (1998), in which infants were shown an event and then tested on two events—one that was considered consistent and another that was considered incon- sistent with the ﬁrst event. Speciﬁcally, infants initially saw one object move behind an occluder from the left, then a dif- ferent object emerge from behind the occluder and move to the right.The authors reasoned that if infants understood that there were two objects in the original event, then they should look longer at the inconsistent event—that is, the display with one object. They found that the 12-month-olds but not the 10-month-olds, looked longer at the one-object display. Based upon these ﬁndings, Xu and Carey concluded that these older infants understood that there were two objects present in the event and had successfully individuated the objects. However, studies with younger infants suggest that they also—under certain circumstances—can individuate objects. In a very recent set of studies, Needham (2001) gave infants exposure to an object prior to presenting two test events that involved an object similar to the prior-experience–object but varying on some feature such as texture (Experiments 1 and 2),