ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part presents a "healthy diversity" of fact and theory. It discusses the cognitive advances during infancy are reflected in the infant's ability to create structures of increasing degrees of abstraction. The first cognitive structure is a schema defined as an "abstract representation of an event that retains the relations among the physical dimensions of the original experience." The part describes the process pertains to the infant's "amplified memorial competence," which emerges between 7 and 8 months and improves progressively during the next few months. The roles of experiential factors and the child’s own experimentation in early cognitive process need to be analyzed in greater detail, and the relationship between cognitive development or early stages of cognition in infancy and subsequent cognitive progress must be confronted.
