ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a much broader description of the many models that have attempted to describe and explain human cognition and development in social context in a fuller sense. For the 20th-century behaviourist the social environment is just like any other in presenting contingencies of reinforcement — but speculation about the mental or cognitive bases of it should just as equally be banished. Development by imitation of role models, “observational learning”, and other principles of socialisation, have also constituted broad associationist models, although, again, there has been little regard for actual cognitive aspects of the processes. Social constructivists have stressed that the structured world for humans is very much a social world, and that this has fundamental consequences for the description and understanding of knowledge and cognition. One criticism of L. S. Vygotsky is similar to that levelled against other models of cognitive development.
