ABSTRACT
Animal experimentation has been enormously helpful in identifying the physical changes in the brain that occur as a result of manipulating the amount, quality, and duration of stimulation. However, these studies furnish only limited information about how neuropsychological processes contribute to the wide variability in the degree to which children benefit from experience. More fundamentally, we want to know what difference consciousness makes in the effectiveness with which mechanisms of attention and memory are employed to learn from experience and expand our knowledge about the world and ourselves. This chapter assesses the attempts by several prominent developmental and cognitive scientists to understand the neuropsychological mechanisms that impede and facilitate learning among infants who experience and respond to unfamiliar situations differently.
