The Child′s Discovery of the Mind (The Developing Child) - Hardcover

Astington, Janet Wilde

9780674116412: The Child′s Discovery of the Mind (The Developing Child)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674116410 ISBN 13: 9780674116412

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1993

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

Three-year-old greets her grandfather at the front door: "We're having a surprise party for your birthday! It's a secret!" We may smile at incidents like these, but they illustrate the beginning of an important transition in children's lives - their development of the "theory of mind". Emily certainly had some sense of her grandfather's feelings, but she clearly doesn't understand much about what he knows, and surprises - like secrets, tricks and lies - all depend on understanding and manipulating what others think and know. Jan Piaget investigated children's discovery of the mind in the 1920s and concluded that they had little understanding before the age of six. However, since the late 1970s researchers have begun to challenge his methods and revise his conclusions. In this volume Janet Astington surveys this lively area of research in developmental psychology. She asserts that sometime between the ages of two and five, children begin to have insights into their own mental life and that of others. They begin, she says, to understand mental representation - that there is a difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the world, between thinking about eating a cookie and eating a cookie. This theory reflects their emerging capacity to infer other people's thoughts, wants, feelings and perceptions from words and actions. Children come to understand why people act as they do and can predict how they will act in the future, so that by the age of five they are knowing participants in social interaction. Astington highlights how crucial children's discovery of the mind is in their social and intellectual development by including a chapter on autistic children, who fail to make this breakthrough.

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From the Back Cover

Jean Piaget investigated children's discovery of the mind in the 1920s and concluded that they had little understanding before the age of six. But over the last twenty years, researchers have begun to challenge his methods and revise his conclusions. In 'The Child's Discovery of the Mind', Janet Wilde Astington surveys this lively area of research in developmental psychology.