Robinson, D. N. (1976). An intellectual history of psychology. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co.Uttal, W., Liu, N., & Kalki, J. (1996). An integrated computational model of three dimensional

vision. Spatial Vision, 9, 393–422.

R. REED HUNTThe University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1054

Contemporary theorizing about young children’s representational and memory development

REPRESENTATION, MEMORY AND DEVELOPMENT: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JEANMANDLER. N. L. Stein, P. J. Bauer, & M. Rabinowitz (eds). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,Mahwah, New Jersey. 2002. ISBN 0-8058-4196-2. Price £42.95 (hardback).

Jean Mandler is an influential figure in the study of cognitive development and, during a long anddistinguished academic career, has made important contributions to our understanding of conceptformation and the emergence of long-term recall in infants and young children. This volume markingthe occasion of her retirement comprises 14 chapters devoted to these and related topics. All chaptershave been written either by colleagues of Mandler or by investigators who embrace her basictheoretical framework.

Following early work on animal learning and discrimination, Mandler’s research interests shiftedtowards children’s perception, leading to a fruitful collaboration with Nancy Stein. Subsequently, shemoved into studies of early event representation and recall along with Mitchell Rabinowitz, RobynFivush, and Tamar Murachver, among others. During the 1980s, together with Patricia Bauer andLaraine McDonough, Mandler initiated her investigation of infants’ conceptual development,focusing on the distinction between perception and abstract thought. This research programme,spawning the publication of the first ‘How to build a baby’ article in 1988 and the second in 1992, hascontinued to the present day. From the early 1990s, Mandler regularly spent time at the MRCCognitive Development Unit, University College London. Colleagues at the latter institution,including Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Alan Leslie, helped develop her ideas about youngchildren’s concept formation.

When Jean Mandler commenced her studies of conceptual development, it was widely believedthat infants are perceptually bound and unable to think abstractly, thus developing object concepts atthe basic level (e.g. cat versus dog) before higher domain levels (e.g. animal versus vehicle).Mandler’s findings from her newly developed object examination and inductive generalizationprocedures led her to reject these assumptions and favour the reverse developmental trend. That is,she argued that global concepts are acquired earlier than specific ones. Other aspects of her researchcontradicted claims that there is little capacity for long-term recall in infancy and early childhood.Using the deferred imitation technique, Mandler demonstrated that very young children are indeedcapable of recalling events some considerable time after they have happened.

The majority of the chapters in this volume deal with infants’ conceptual learning. These chaptertackle three main issues, first, the distinction between perceptual and conceptual representations andevidence of abstract thought during infancy, second, the role of perceptual analysis in derivingabstract concepts, and third, the contribution of language to conceptual development.

Mandler’s proposals about the abstract, global nature of infants’ concepts are endorsed andextended in chapters by Alan Leslie, Katherine Nelson, Angelica Ware, and Laraine McDonough.Leslie similarly argues for the existence of abstract conceptual representations in early childhoodbased on his analysis of the special case of the concept of ‘pretend’. His chapter describes themetarepresentational theory of pretence and considers its wider implications for notions aboutconceptual development. Nelson and Ware find support for Mandler’s conclusions in their own work

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examining young children’s generalizations of their first nouns, particularly in relation to artefacts.They argue that recent findings indicating pre-schoolers assign importance to functional rather thanperceptual properties when categorizing artefacts are consistent with Mandler’s evidence that earlyemerging concepts are based on broad meanings rather than specific perceptual likenesses. In arelated vein, McDonough reviews the literature evaluating the importance of perceptual similarity toconceptual development considering outcomes for verbal versus non-verbal measures. She presentsnew data suggesting young children’s extensions of first words are based on domain-level relations asopposed to perceptual features, consistent with the results of the non-verbal measures used byMandler.

Issues regarding the genesis of abstract concepts are considered in chapters by Larry Barsalou,Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Susan Carey, Rochel Gelman, and Mitchell Rabinowitz. Mandler arguesthat infants derive abstract concepts by analysing the kinds of movements that objects make and theirinteractions with other objects in the context of events. She posits this analysis of object interactionsin terms of contact, simultaneity, and contingency means perceptual features eventually are re-described in more abstract terms to create categories based on meaning (i.e. ‘image schemas’). Forexample, she suggests infants define animals as ‘self-moving objects that interact contingently withother objects, often from a distance’ and artefacts as objects that are ‘moved by others and do notinteract contingently from a distance’ (Mandler, 1999, p. 305). Barsalou is sympathetic to Mandler’sview that infants acquire concepts by analysing events. He discusses his own ideas about situatedconcepts, arguing that conceptual knowledge is embedded in events even for adults, and reviewsevidence for the prominence of thematic relations to human concepts at all ages. The chapter byAnnette Karmiloff-Smith addresses the problem of concept formation in relation to atypicaldevelopment. She suggests the kind of research Mandler has carried out with normally developinginfants might usefully be applied to atypically developing infants to reveal whether the latter groupbuild the same kinds of image schemas and whether they likewise simplify and re-describeperceptual input to derive abstract meanings. In contrast, while broadly supporting the distinctionbetween perceptual and abstract categories, both Susan Carey and Rochel Gelman reject the idea thatthe latter owe their development to the analysis of spatial and movement information. Carey arguesinstead that such conceptual distinctions as the animal/non-animal distinction depend on coreknowledge derived from innate learning mechanisms in the domains of intuitive mechanics andintuitive psychology (e.g. Carey & Spelke, 1994). Gelman similarly favours the view that conceptformation is guided by innate domain-specific learning principles, that is, principles specific tobiological versus non-biological objects. She reviews evidence that, both for adults and youngchildren, higher-order causal knowledge drives selective attention and encoding during conceptlearning rather than vice versa. Finally, the chapter by Rabinowitz expands on ideas advanced byMandler and others about the utility of distinguishing between a symbol manipulation system and asubsymbolic network system of knowledge representation. Whereas he concurs that a hybrid modelis needed, Rabinowitz does not believe the former system should be characterized as declarative andthe latter system as procedural. He therefore queries the notion that development represents aprogression from purely procedural knowledge to an integration of procedural and declarativeknowledge, as suggested by Mandler.

The role of language in conceptual development is debated in the chapters by Terry Regier andLaura Carlson, Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Hespos. Regier and Carlson follow Mandler and othersin presenting evidence for culturally invariant aspects of cognition in infancy that guide languageacquisition, taking the specific example of spatial understanding. Spelke and Hespos agree thatinfants possess a conceptual system before they acquire language, especially one attuned to spatio-temporal relationships among objects, but contradict Mandler by arguing that the spatio-temporalsystem is domain specific. That is, in line with the arguments presented by Susan Carey and RochelGelman, Spelke and Hespos endorse the idea of core knowledge. They therefore suggest there isunlikely to be a single process of perceptual analysis giving rise to a single, unified conceptualsystem.

The remaining chapters in this volume were inspired by Mandler’s work on the development ofevent memory during infancy and early childhood. The chapter by Patricia Bauer reviews herresearch collaboration with Mandler aimed at elucidating the emergence of long-term recall inchildren under three years old. Using the technique of elicited or deferred imitation for examiningnon-verbal recall, their studies examined the effects of temporal structure and repeated experience onchildren’s event representations. The chapter by Tamar Murachver discusses her recent experiments

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in the same tradition examining how the organizational structure of events affects children’s recall,particularly in relation to the role of the social context in encoding and remembering. Finally, RobynFivush and Nancy Stein consider young children’s memory for traumatic events, a topic relativelyunder-investigated compared to other aspects of children’s event memory. Fivush formulatespredictions about trauma memory based on knowledge about children’s developing event repre-sentations while qualifying this approach by drawing attention to the likely effects of social-culturalfactors and inter-personal relationships that influence the child’s wider belief systems. Stein focusesinstead on the usefulness of research into developmental changes in emotional understanding ininforming theories about emotion and memory.

In conclusion, this book provides a good overview of some dominant themes in contemporarytheorizing about young children’s representational and memory development, as well as drawingattention to important directions for future research. A particular strength is its inclusion of materialwith applied as well as theoretical significance. The chapters devoted to children’s long-term recalland the effects of emotional trauma on their event memories, in particular, are likely to be of interestto researchers studying methods of forensic interviewing in young age groups. Given the focus oncontributions from people linked both professionally and personally with Jean Mandler, however, itis inevitable this book fails to cover all major perspectives on early representation and memory.There is therefore no discussion of alternatives to Mandler’s dual-process framework of conceptformation, for example, approaches that postulate a gradual process of category enrichment asinfants gain experience and knowledge about the world (review by Mareschal & Quinn, 2001) norany mention of extensive work with infants using operant techniques to yield data about theirmemory capabilities (review by Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2001). In relation to its aim, though, this bookclearly succeeds in celebrating the career of Jean Mandler and her central contributions to the studyof cognitive development.

REFERENCES

Carey, S., & Spelke, E. (1994). Domain specific knowledge and conceptual change. In L. Hirschfield,& S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 169–200). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Mandler, J. M. (1999). Seeing is not the same as thinking: commentary on ‘making sense of infantcategorization’. Developmental Review, 19, 297–306.

Mareschal, D., & Quinn, P. C. (2001). Categorization in infancy. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 5,443–450.

Rovee-Collier, C., & Barr, R. (2001). Infant learning and memory. In G. Bremner, & A. Fogel (Eds.),Blackwell handbook of infant development (pp. 139–168). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

RUTH FORDUniversity of Wales, Swansea

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.961

Theoretical and applied aspects of thinking

THINKING: PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON REASONING, JUDGEMENT ANDDECISION MAKING. D. Hardman and L. Macchi (Eds.). John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Chichester,UK, 2003. No of pages 376. ISBN 0-471-49457-7. Price £75 (Cloth).

This new book presents a series of research reviews covering different aspects of thinking, eachwritten by researchers at the cutting edge in their field. Theoretical and empirical aspects of thinking

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Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 18: 1271–1277 (2004)