ABSTRACT
The Holy Grail for researchers in cognitive development is a theory that explains the emergence of intelligent behavior in humans from birth through early childhood through adolescence. Regardless of the specific focus of the research, be it face perception, language, reaching, counting, or scientific reasoning, the goal is to propose a set of processes that can not only account for the vast body of data at hand but also make novel predictions. This is a daunting task and the organizers and contributors to this symposium are to be commended for rising to the challenge implicit in the title of this volume: “Mechanisms of Cognitive Development.” But what does this focus on mechanism mean? What constitutes a mechanism of cognitive development, and what do the chapters reviewed here tell us about such mechanisms?
