Description
Book SynopsisThe essential nature of learning is primarily thought of as a verbal process or function, but this notion conveys that pre-linguistic infants do not learn. Far from being blank slates that passively absorb environmental stimuli, infants are active learners who perceptually engage their environments and extract information from them before language is available. The ecological approach to perceiving-defined as a theory about perceiving by active creatures who look and listen and move around was spearheaded by Eleanor and James Gibson in the 1950s and culminated in James Gibson''s last book in 1979. Until now, no comprehensive theoretical statement of ecological development has been published since Eleanor Gibson''s Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969).In An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development, distinguished experimental psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick provide a unique theoretical framework for the ecological approach to underst
Trade ReviewThis is a beautifully written book, and a most welcome addition to the field of perceptual development, indeed to the whole discipline of child development. For years I have taught a graduate course in perceptual development and never had a text that I felt I could assign in its entirety. Now I do, because this book brings a lucid introduction that is crystal clear in its explication of the complex ideas encompassed by this field. The scholarship is deep, accurate, and thorough. * Rachel K. Clifton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst *
Table of Contents1. Historical Perspectives and Present-Day Confrontations ; 2. An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Development ; 3. Studying Perceptual Development in Preverbal Infants: Tasks, Methods, and Motivation ; 4. Development and Learning in Infancy ; 5. What Infants Learn About: Communication ; 6. What Infants Learn About: Interaction with Objects ; 7. What Infants Learn About: Locomotion and the Spatial Layout ; 8. The Learning Process in Infancy: Facts and Theory ; 9. Hallmarks of Human Behaviour ; 10. The Role of Perception in Development beyond Infancy ; References ; Index
