Learning and the Infant Mind

When asking how cognition comes to takes it mature form, learning seems to be an obvious factor to consider. However, until quite recently, there has been very little contact between investigations of how infants learn and what infants know. The chapters in this book document, for the first time, the insights that emerge when researchers who come from diverse domains and use different approaches make a genuine attempt to bridge this divide.

Amanda Woodward is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her doctorate at Stanford University, did post doctoral work at Cornell University, and taught at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at Maryland. She studies infant social cognition and early language development. Amy Needham is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. She earned her doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining the faculty at Duke University. She studies cognitive and motor development in infancy.

Contributors
Introduction Amanda Woodward and Amy Needham
1: Learning and Memory: Like a Horse and Carriage
Patricia J. Bauer
2: What can Statistical Learning Tell us about Infant Learning?
Jenny R. Saffran
3: Developmental Origins of Object Perception
Scott P. Johnson
4: An Account of Infants' Physical Reasoning
Renee Baillargeon, Jie Li, Weiting Ng, Sylvia Yuan
5: Experience Primes Infants to Individuate Objects: Illuminating Learning Mechanisms
Teresa Wilcox and Rebecca Woods
6: How infants learn categories
Lisa M. Oakes, Jessica S. Horst, Kristine A. Kovach-Lesh, and Sammy Perone
7: Multiple Learning Mechanisms in the Development of Action
Karen E. Adolph and Amy S. Joh
8: Learning in Infants' Object Perception, Object-directed Action, and Tool Use
Amy Needham
9: Infants' Learning about Intentional Action
Amanda Woodward
10: Early Word Learning and Other Seemingly Symbolic Behaviors
Laura L. Namy
11: Symbol-based Learning in Infancy
Judy S. DeLoache and Patricia A. Ganea
12: The Role of Learning in Cognitive Development: Challenges and Prospects
Richard N. Aslin