Developmental Psychology: How Nature and Nurture Interact - Softcover

Richardson, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0333740432 ISBN 13: 9780333740439

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

The last twenty years of research on human development have seen a revolution in our view of the human infant. A newborn baby looks at his mother and imitates her actions, without learning. How does he know how to poke his tongue out? Why does he know? Mostof us still assume representations in the mind to be the condition of intelligent action, even though simple robots with no central representations at all can navigate around cluttered environments and draw maps of them. Nearly everyone wants to retain the term 'innate' even though we are finding that supposedly 'innate' behaviours are not determined and depend upon experience. We want to treat genetic selection as basic evolution, so how did genes evolve? How can all this be? Psychology is caught in a conflict of paradigms. We all claim to be interactionists, yet we continue to accept the language and the thinking of traditional dichotomies: nature/nurture, innate/learned, mind/body, organism/environment. This clear and refreshingly-written authoritative text explores these confusions and provides a trenchant critique of dichotomous thinking. It moves on to offer an alternative view of development, first describing in an accessible way ecological and dynamic systems perspectives and then combining them to provide a more coherent and powerful critique of recent research and major issues.

About this title

About the Author

DR KEITH RICHARDSON is Associate Lecturer on the Open University course in Child Development and Senior Lecturer in Education at Whitefield Schools and Centre, London, incorporating liaison with Kingston University on four postgraduate diplomas.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333740432
• ISBN 13: 9780333740439
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272