ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book on cognitive development in children takes its place in a series on psychology in progress. The brief description of the different approaches that have contributed to the study of cognitive development, although it verges on caricature, does something to demonstrate the complexity of the question of cognition. The book focuses on some of the areas of work on developing thinking that seemed to the editor at the beginning of the 1980s particularly exciting, coherent or important. The focus is psychological, but a psychology that concerns itself with the other biological and social sciences, and in particular with education, which is a professional preoccupation of most of the contributors. This focus is one which the authors share with their predecessors; notably with Bruner and, as Andrew Sutton describes in the last chapter, with Soviet developmental psychologists.
