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This landmark text integrates diverse perspectives on how humans understand others'minds (or ‘theory of mind') beyond early childhood into middle childhood and adolescence. It explores how the neural, cognitive, and social changes of middle childhood and adolescence shape the ongoing development of theory of mind, and how theory of mind helps children navigate their lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research from leading international experts, this book provides a survey and analysis of the current state and future direction of the field. It is organized around three themes relating to the key issues in contemporary research. The first part focuses on the biological and cognitive bases of theory of mind in middle childhood and adolescence. The second part goes on to explore the social predictors and consequences, considering how theory of mind is shaped by social experiences and, in turn, impacts children's social lives in middle childhood and adolescence. Finally, the third part focuses on theory of mind in the context of neurodiversity, disability, and youth mental health in middle childhood and adolescence.Offering in-depth understanding for all students and scholars of developmental and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology and psychiatry, and education, this valuable text also identifies an agenda for future scholarship on this exciting topic.

Children think in a different way to adults. They also think differently at different ages. This book, originally published in 1984, studies the growth of those processes by means of which thinking evolves from infancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood. It covers perception, memory, language and, above all, the development of mental ‘programmes', or strategies, through which people structure and hence comprehend the information coming to them from their environment.The study of cognitive development has obvious educational implications. Development in the pre-school period, the appropriateness of schooling for levels of cognitive competence, and the significance of ageing are just some of the issues considered.

It has often been maintained that young children's knowledge is limited to perceptual appearances. In this'preoperational'stage of development, there are profound conceptual limitations in that they have little understanding of numerical and causal relations and are incapable of insight into the minds of others. Their apparent inability to perform well on traditional developmental measures has led researchers to accept a model of the young child as plagued by conceptual deficits. These ideas have had a major impact on educational programs. Many have accepted the view that the young are not ready for instruction and that their memory and understanding is vulnerable to distortion, especially in subjects such as mathematics and science. However, the second edition of this book provides further evidence that children's stage-like performance can frequently be reinterpreted in terms of a clash between the conversational worlds of adults and children. In many settings, children may not share an adult's well-meaning purpose or use of words in questioning. Under these conditions, they do not disclose the depth of their memory and understanding and may respond incorrectly even when they are certain of the right answer. In this light, a different model of development emerges with significant implications for instruction in educational, health, and legal settings. It attributes more competence to young children than is frequently recognized and reflects the position that development in evolutionarily important domains is guided by implicit constraints on learning. It proposes that attention to young children's conversational experience is a powerful means to illustrate what they know.

The shortcomings of Piaget's theory of intellectual development are well-known. Less clear is what sort of theory should be devised to replace it. This volume describes the current'main contenders,'including neo-Piagetian, neo-connectionist, neo-innatist and sociocultural models. Its contributors conclude that none of these models are adequate because each one implies a view of the human mind which is either too general, too particular, or too modular. A collaborative program of research -- seven years in the making -- is then described, which gives support to a newly emerging synthesis of these various positions.

Security of Attachment and the Social Development of Cognition investigates how children's security of attachment in infancy is related to various aspects of their cognitive development over the preschool years. The book thus constitutes an ambitious attempt to build bridges between the domains of social and cognitive development, and as such addresses issues which are of increasing interest to developmental psychologists. In the first two chapters, Meins outlines Bowlby's attachment theory and the research which it has inspired, and develops the theme of a secure attachment relationship providing children with a sense of themselves as effective agents in their interactions with the world (self-efficacy).The next five chapters describe a longitudinal study of a sample of children whose security of attachment was assessed in infancy. Security-related differences are reported in the areas of object/person permanence, language acquisition, symbolic play, maternal tutoring and theory of mind, but no differences were found in general cognitive ability. Meins argues that the wide-ranging advantages enjoyed by the securely attached children are best explained in terms of their greater self-efficacy and social flexibility, nurtured by a particular kind of early infant-mother interaction.This book's major contribution is in its approach to explaining why securely attached children may be more self-effective and flexible in social interactions. Meins attempts to account for these differences within a Vygotskian framework, focusing on the secure dyad's greater ability to function within the zone of proximal development. She suggests that a mother's mind-mindedness (the propensity to treat one's infant as an individual with a mind) is an important factor in determining her ability to interact sensitively with her child. In the final chapter, Meins considers how the Vygotskian approach can complement and extend existing theories of attachment, and suggests some ways in which future research might address outstanding questions in this rapidly advancing field.