: Cognition in Children, by Usha Goswami

Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis, 1998. £14.95 (xxii + 328 pages)ISBN 0 86377 825 9Writing a book on cognitive development has never been an easy task, and these days it’s positively daunting. Any author must navigate several theoretical and often competing crosscurrents. Coming straight at you are the Piagetians and the neo-Piagetians. From another direction come the information processors. From still another come the Vygotskiians and the social contextualists. And threatening to engulf the field right now are those upstarts, the neuroscientists and the connectionists! What is a cognitive developmentalist to do?Usha Goswami’s tack, in her new and excellent book, Cognition in Children, is to steer right into the storm. Not only does she lay out the competing theoretical perspectives that govern current work in the field, but she anchors them in the light of the latest empirical research and even attempts a theoretical synthesis of sorts. No taking the easy way out here.In many ways, this book captures much of the excitement and controversy in the field of cognitive development today. With Piaget’s theory now seen less as an accurate description of cognitive development and more as only one part of the theoretical backdrop for motivating work in the area, the field is in search of some unifying framework. While that framework is not supplied in this book, Goswami goes a long way towards sorting out the types of studies and evidence that need to be assimilated into any unifying account. Even some leads for what form that unifying framework might take are offered.Goswami is a gifted writer and provides lucid summaries of what are rapidly becoming the new ‘classic’ experiments in the cognitive development field. Because of the fast-moving nature of this field, it is hard for an outsider, or even an insider, to get an overall sense of how individual studies fit together into some larger whole. That Goswami has managed to organize the new cognitive-development literature into something approaching a coherent whole is a testimony to the contribution that this book makes to outsiders and insiders alike.Less obviously, the book is also a testimony to the ingenuity of cognitive development researchers. Working with children and trying to access their nascent thinking skills can appear deceptively easy. But here, appearance and reality diverge. Goswami does a terrific job of describing the methods that have been used to access children’s thinking skills, while pointing out shortcomings of various experimental efforts. From a methodological perspective, the book will delight individuals who enjoy the formidable task of designing that ever elusive yet foolproof experimental procedure. In this connection, Goswami nicely guides the reader through the maze of various experimental demonstrations of a given topic and provides a clear overview of the ways in which previously accepted findings and associated procedures have been challenged. This is especially true for many of the classic Piagetian topics that Goswami reviews, including logical reasoning, conservation, causal thinking and the like.One common complaint about the cognitive development field these days is that it is becoming increasingly fragmented. Many researchers are presently plumbing a particular area rather than trying to search for organizing principles that could help to explain the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of cognitive development more generally. Goswami does not shy away from these fundamental questions. In this connection, she makes the interesting suggestion that young children might have an innate propensity to seek out the causal underpinnings of the world around them. This propensity in turn helps to propel children’s subsequent cognitive growth. While this proposal needs to be fleshed out, it is one type of candidate mechanism that could help to tie together a lot of the loose strands in the cognitive development literature today.At the same time, there are other strands in the cognitive development literature that are not well represented in the volume. Readers will have to look elsewhere for information about children’s theory of mind or about sociocultural theories of cognitive development. Admittedly, these topics are to be the subjects of entire volumes in the series of which Cognition in Children is a part. Nevertheless, the omission of material on sociocultural theories of cognitive development, for instance, helps to perpetuate the view that children follow a universal course of cognitive development, independent of the culture in which they are raised and the contributions of more cognitively skilled members of that culture. Additionally, recent alternative theoretical approaches for understanding cognitive development, such as connectionism or dynamic-systems theory, receive little mention.Some conclusions from the volume also need to be viewed cautiously. Recent work on infant cognition is reviewed a bit too uncritically: there is currently considerable controversy about attributing a great deal of cognitive competence to young infants on the basis of visual habituation/dishabituation studies alone. Likewise, there is debate about how to interpret reports of early competency in such areas as imitation and causal understanding. The resolutions of these controversies have significant implications for understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of cognitive development.Nevertheless, Cognition in Children is an important step forward in the attempt to understand cognitive development in the post-Piaget era. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students and even seasoned researchers will find much to admire and to stimulate the mind in this excellent volume.