Goswami is a student of Ann Brown's who works in England. She has done a
lot of interesting work on young children's use of analogical thinking
and she is very well read in the literature on early cognitive
development.
Her book emphasize the tremendous influence of those studies, begun
about 30 years ago, showing that when preschoolers were placed in
situtions that made "human sense" to them, they performed sophisticated
cognitive operations that Piaget said didn't develop until later. One
direction this discussion has led to is to the notion of core conceptual
domains that organize cognitive development. At one extreme of this
tendency one arrives at modularity theory -- Chomskian cognitive pscychology
but that is not Goswami's position. Rather, she adopts something like
the "skeletal principles" version of domain theory, and places a special
emphasis on what she calls the "causal bias," an innate bias of humans
to seek the causes of the events they participate in.
Questions of theory aside, I came away from the book with the following
odd question: According to the data, 4-5 year olds have developed theories
about how the world works in all of the major "core domains" current
theorists bandy about (they read a lot like Gardner's seven
intelligences, and not by accident).
If the little one's know so much, what does cognitive in middle
childhood add? Or substract, or change, or whatever? Adults clearly
treat 4 year old and 9 year old kids differently. What do the older
kids know/do that makes this different form of social structuring
work?
On a summer's day.
mike