Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain

Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the bestselling Cognition in Children. This full-color textbook has been re-written from the perspective of brain science and shows how new discoveries in cognitive neuroscience force us to reconsider traditional theories of cognitive development. Goswami considers the established base of cognitive developmental psychology and demonstrates how new data from brain science require a new theoretical framework based on learning. This book presents a new paradigm for teaching cognitive development, going beyond Piaget to learning and the brain.

Conceptualizing cognitive development around three core domains of human knowledge – naïve physics, naïve biology and naïve psychology – the book considers the learning mechanisms available to the infant brain. Each chapter explores how these mechanisms affect different aspects of cognitive development. Starting with the development of these foundational domains in infancy, Goswami goes on to consider social cognition, language acquisition, causal learning and explanation-based reasoning, and theory of mind. Later chapters explore memory, reasoning, metacognition, executive functions, reading and numbers. The final chapter analyzes the contribution of more traditional theoretical perspectives (Piaget and Vygotsky), linking these to connectionism and neuroconstructivism. The intimate links between language acquisition and symbolic systems, cognitive development and social/cultural learning form the core of the book. 

This valuable textbook is essential reading for teachers and students of developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as education, language and the learning sciences. It will also be of interest to anyone training to work with infants and children.

Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain is supported by online Student and Instructor Resources, access to which is free of charge to adopters of the book and their students.

Usha Goswami is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. She is also Director of the Faculty’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education. Prior to moving back to Cambridge in 2003, she was Professor of Cognitive Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Child Health, University College London 1997 - 2003, and before that, she was University Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, 1990-1997.