ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines what readers know about the development of some more specific cognitive skills. It describes selected areas - perception, executive functions, attention, memory, metacognition and social cognition - and draws some conclusions about the developmental processes involved and how they can be facilitated. Children and adults are more likely to have seen it all before, to remember previous occasions and to have a sense of what it all means. Perception becomes intertwined with cognitive processes such as memory and the deliberate controlled use of attention, and it becomes much more embedded in social relations and culture acculturated. Metacognition is related to intelligence, giftedness, memory, reading, reasoning, communication, mathematical problem solving and other areas. Various educational programmes teaching scientific thinking employ group work and its potential for metacognitive conflict. The field of moral development has been dominated by a model of morality that emphasised its rationality and to some degree separated it from emotional content.
