Children take their first steps, produce their first words, and become able to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects many other previous developments that occurred in the whole child across a range of domains, and each change, in turn, will provide opportunities for future development. This book proposes that all change can be explained in terms of developmental cascades such that events that occur at one point in development set the stage, or cause a ripple effect, for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behaviors at another poin ... More

Children take their first steps, produce their first words, and become able to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects many other previous developments that occurred in the whole child across a range of domains, and each change, in turn, will provide opportunities for future development. This book proposes that all change can be explained in terms of developmental cascades such that events that occur at one point in development set the stage, or cause a ripple effect, for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behaviors at another point in time. The authors argue that these developmental cascades are influenced by different kinds of constraints that do not have a single foundation: They may originate from the structure of the child’s nervous system and body, the physical or social environment, or knowledge and experience. These constraints occur at multiple levels of processing and change over time, and both contribute to developmental cascades and are the product of them. The book presents an overview of this developmental cascade perspective as a general framework for understanding change throughout the lifespan, although it is applied primarily to cognitive development in infancy. The book also addresses how a cascade approach obviates the dichotomy between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms. The framework is applied in detail to three domains within infant cognitive development—namely, looking behavior, object representations, and concepts for animacy—as well as two domains unrelated to infant cognition (gender and attachment).