ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on development. It outlines the developmental trends of systems of the four-fold architecture; that is, representational capacity and efficiency, cognizance, reasoning, and the domains and their architecture with the AACog mechanism. It is proposed that development occurs in four major developmental cycles, with two phases in each. New representations emerge early in each cycle and their alignment dominates later. In succession, the four cycles operate with episodic representations from birth to 2 years (remembrances of actions and experiences preserving their spatial and time properties), realistic mental representations from 2–6 years (blueprints of episodic representations where spatial and time properties are reduced, associated with symbols, such as words and mental images), generic rules organizing representations into conceptual/action systems from 6–11 years, (e.g., concepts about categories of things, exploring causal relations) and overarching principles integrating rules into systems where truth and multiple relations can be evaluated, from 11–18 years (i.e., principles specifying how rules may be integrated). The four cycles are explicated and related with individual differences in psychometric intelligence.
