A radical departure from most of current cognitive developmenttheory.... Nativists, structuralists, empiricists and socialconstructivists will disagree with different parts of this book.Yet this landmark volume is essential reading for all of them.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Mark H. Johnson
Nature
Those of us who study development have been searching for years for ways to make the field more dynamic. Here finally Thelen and smith have put together a choherent dynamic systems framework on which we can build. They not only portray the best dynamic systems research, but they ground it in an exciting, powerful way of thinking that will serve as a new foundation for helping to remake the study of developing behavior.
Kurt W. Fischer, Ph.D.
The emphasis this book places on dynamic processes and change in development is welcome and will benefit developmental psychology. We badly need both theory and research on how change comes about. That, after all, is the reason for a developmental approach. I welcome, too, the strong view that change and development have to be the result of interactions of multiple factors, not single causes, either enviornmental or genetic.
Eleanor J. Gibson, Susan Lynn Sage Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Cornell University
In this provocative monograph, Thelen and Smith propse a dynamical systems approach to child development as an alternative to the commonplace approaches of nativism-rationalism (emphasizing inborn hypotheses and conceptual representations), epiricism (emphasizing specific learning experiences), Piaget (emphasizing stages of logical competence), and information processing (emphasizing strategies of encoding and retrieval). Thelen and Smith's emphasis is on very general principles that govern the progressive formation and differentiation of patterns in physical, chemical, and biological systems. Through argument and experiment, they convey the messages that a dynamics approach offers a fresh and productive perspective on traditional developmental issues and that it discloses essential but nonobvious aspects of the developmental process that would be forever hidden from traditional perspectives. Thelen and Smith have chosem a path to understanding the characteristics processes of humans and other animals that D'Arcy Thompson (1917) lamented was a path taken over the ages by only a small band of travelers. To his delight, this book of Thelen and Smith's will encourage many more investigators of development, both beginners and seasoned veterans, to tread the difficult but inevitably rewarding path of dynamical analysis.
Professor M. T. Turvey, Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut
