Contents

#### **Preface** XI



Preface

How does a child make sense of her world? Every day, children are exposed to a plethora of stimulation, only little of which has apparent structure. Take visual stimulation, for example: With every motion of the eyes, the head, or the body, the retinal image changes – at least to some extent. Add to that the changes in apparent size and orientation due to object motion, changes in lightening, and changes that occur though the actions of others Yet, even babies learn to perceive stabilities in the environment, learn to make predictions about their surroundings, and learn to control situations through their own actions. At the center of this impressive feat is a child's ability to connect separate pieces of information into larger wholes. The resulting pattern of Gestalt makes it possible for children to distinguish relevant from irrelevant stimulation, and as a result, ignore stimulation that is potentially overwhelming. In short, it allows children to make sense of their surrounding (cf., Thagard, 2000).

The mental process of linking isolated events into overarching patterns of Gestalts, despite appearing trivial on some levels, is not well understood. How do children connect individual events spontaneously without any top-down guidance? How does the rate of linking events change over the course of development? And how is it possible to tune out some stimulation, while still being open to that which yields learning and development? These are only some of the many questions in the area of children's learning and cognition that have eluded a clear answer. This difficulty in

On the theoretical level, the area of cognitive development has experienced something of a vacuum, ever since Piaget's stage theory was challenged. Challenges pertained not only to the specific time course of concept development (e.g., underestimating infant abilities), but also to having to explain substantial performance variability as a function of seemingly irrelevant task details. Other mainstream theories did not fare much better in terms of shedding light on how children make sense of their surrounding. This is because they traced the emergence of a knowledge organization to the presence of some already existing knowledge (cf., Spelke et al., 1992), leading to an infinite regress of explanations (cf., Juarrero, 1999). A more complete theory of learning and cognitive development would have to explain the emergence of a knowledge Gestalt without reducing it to yet another knowledge Gestalt. Such theories, geared towards explaining self-organization of coherent patterns (e.g., Jensen, 1998), provide promising tools for developmental scientists to investigate the dynamic processes underlying cognition and

generating a clear answer has its roots both in theory and empirical data.
