Ontogenesis

During ontogenesis, these needs become more and more integrated into the increasingly complex systems of behavior control.

From: Advances in Psychology , 2000

Reflexes

F.S. Pedroso , in Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development, 2008

Normal Development of Reflexes in Childhood

The ontogenesis of reflexes in the human being contributes to the identification of evolutionary stages in our species. In intrauterine life, the reflexes follow a cephalic to caudal onset pattern, while in the limbs their pattern is from distal to proximal, differing from the muscle tone, which is the opposite – it increases with gestational age from caudal to cephalic. The spinal reflex arc is fully developed by the 8th week of gestation and the deep tendon reflex at the knees and ankles may be elicited in premature infants at 19–23  weeks of gestation, but they all become evident only after the 33rd week of gestation. In examining a 28-week-old preterm infant, we also find the deep tendon, the withdrawal, the cutaneous extensor plantar, and the palmo-plantar grasp reflexes, the extensor phase of the Moro reflex, and the Galant, rooting, acoustic blink, and optical blink reflexes. The pupillary reflex is absent before 28   weeks of gestation and present after 30   weeks of gestation, Glabella around 32   weeks, the neck-righting reflex appears between 34 and 37   weeks; head turning in response to light appears between 32 and 36   weeks. Full-blown walking and crossed extensor reflexes appear only between 35 and 37   weeks.

After birth, the direction of maturation is now only cephalo–caudal, as occurs with the myelination of the pyramidal tract, which enables the voluntary control of more cephalic than caudal segments. It is already possible to observe at the first 3   months of life manifestations of voluntary control of the facial muscles that are used to smile and eat, and subsequently the control of neck muscles, the voluntary use of the hand, the ability of sitting down, the control of the standing position, and finally the control of the sphincter ( Figure 10 ). This sequence in maturation allows the muscle tone to decrease and many PRs to be integrated in the CNS.

Figure 10. Sequence of voluntary motor control.

In preterm infants, the reflexes, as well as the tone and the voluntary movements, show a lagged evolution in comparison with full-term infants. The same does not occur with the sensory function which in the premature child maturates before the motor one. From the 37th week of gestation on, the infant is already capable of performing conditioned reflexes and learning.

This ability of learning is supported by the reflex motor activity, which enables a contact with the external environment in ample and diversified ways, thereby resulting in new sensory inputs that, integrated with cortical levels, will create a feedback able to gradually turn movements that are initially reflex or automatic into voluntary. The predominatly inhibitory synaptic connections of the cerebral cortex to the brainstem (cortico-subcortical integration process) are known to be able to change the reflexes, leading the infant to learn how to use these basic patterns of reaction in his automatic activities, and later in the voluntary activities as well. The reflexes are thus partially discarded and partially incorporated into new patterns of motor expressions ( Figure 11 ). The reflex multiplicity, especially the primitive, is, therefore, of paramount importance to neuropsychological evolution.

Figure 11. The development of primative reflexes.

Despite a few conjectures that some PRs are the precursors to voluntary activities, as the walking and palmar grasp reflexes, for instance, these have not been supported, since the results of studies, including those carried out by us, do not show any relationship between the age of extinguishing of these reflexes and the age at which the first voluntary activities are observed, both being able to coexist.

We should also consider the period of transition from reflex activities to voluntary ones, an intermediate behavior in which many reflexes become more or less conditioned and full of patterns of repetitious movements, which precede the voluntary control (called the rhythmic stereotypes, e.g., the movements of the toes of the feet). Another example are the rhythmic vocalizations, which provoke one feedback auditory which is basic for the development of the hearing and the language. The decline of rhythmic stereotypes is related with the progressive prevalence of voluntary behavior.

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Affect, People, and Digital Social Networks

Adam Nash , in Emotions, Technology, and Social Media, 2016

Ontogenesis and Individuation

Simondon's philosophy of ontogenesis and individuation was very influential on Gilles Deleuze ( Iliadis, 2013), who has himself been very influential on affect theory. It is Deleuze, along with Guattari, Spinoza, and Bergson, who Patricia Clough invokes to envisage a new concept of a body that is expanded through digitization and informationally open to its environment. In this, Clough is echoing similar philosophies to Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, and, most notably, Anna Munster. Such philosophies are inspired by Deleuze's concept of the virtual and his reading of Spinoza's definition of bodies as "compositions of relations" (Deleuze, 1988, p. 124) and therefore of affect that may not be reduced to physical interactions. This is in apparent contrast with contemporary neuroscience. Much of Deleuze's thinking about the virtual/actual continuum and becoming is heavily influenced by Simondon's ontogenetic philosophy of the metastable preindividual, transduction, and individuation. Take, for example, this passage from Deleuze's (1994) Difference and Repetition:

All individuality is intensive, and therefore serial, stepped and communicating, comprising and affirming in itself the difference in intensities by which it is constituted. Gilbert Simondon has shown recently that individuation presupposes a prior metastable state - in other words, the existence of a 'disparateness' such as at least two orders of magnitude or two scales of heterogeneous reality between which potentials are distributed. (p. 246)

Later in the same book, Deleuze (1994) puts this concept—of individuation as an ongoing Simondonian procedural resolution of disparate entities within a metastable environment—in the context of Nietzsche's Dionysian will to power that recognizes the concept of the individual as abstract, replaced in actuality by individuation:

What cannot be replaced is individuation itself. Beyond the self and the I we find not the impersonal but the individual and its factors, individuation and its fields, individuality and its pre-individual singularities. (p. 321)

This is important because I argue that the digital capitalists who operate the world's most popular social networks use an understanding of the Simondonian transindividual nature of digital networks to exploit predigital beliefs of individuality and agency among their users so that their users both produce and consume the social network companies' product without participating in either the profits thereby produced or the opportunities offered by an opening to the transindividual operating possibility of digital networks. This one-sided relationship is the cause and the emblem of what we might call the anxiety of the digital network. Understanding the transindividual possibility of digital networks also clarifies Simondon's understanding of affectivity and emotions, which is quite similar to de Spinoza's (1996) understanding of affect as a continuous variation in powers to act and, therefore, of understandable appeal to Deleuze.

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Vygotsky and Recent Developments

J.V. Wertsch , in International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010

Genetic Analysis

Vygotsky approached the early years of ontogenesis in terms of the interaction of two lines of development: the natural and the cultural, and he viewed the qualitative transformation of mental functioning that results from this interaction as key. He viewed any attempt to reduce all mental functions to amalgamations of lower order, biologically driven stimulus–response patterns as fundamentally misguided. The development of will or volition, for instance, is not to be seen as growing out of an iterative process of stimulus–response mechanisms, but as a qualitatively different type of phenomenon grounded in social processes. This was part of his effort to avoid the traps of the associationist and other reductionist approaches.

Like other major developmental theorists of his day, Vygotsky did not view developmental analysis as applying only to ontogenesis, and although much of his empirical study focused on children, he by no means assumed that developmental analysis could be equated with child psychology. Instead, it applies to several, qualitatively distinct genetic domains (Wertsch, 1985), namely phylogenesis, sociocultural history, ontogenesis, and microgenesis. As such, his notion of developmental psychology was much broader than what is often assumed in contemporary writings.

Vygotsky's approach to genetic analysis tends to interpret cultural differences in terms of developmental hierarchy, something that is no longer readily accepted by many cultural anthropologists. In their comparative studies of abstract reasoning in the 1930s, for example, Vygotsky and Luria interpreted differences between Uzbek and Russian performance as reflecting different stages in a grand developmental hierarchy. For them, this was what might be termed a cross-historical, rather than a cross-cultural study since they interpreted differences in the groups' performance as reflecting different stages in the evolution of a single general form of human civilization. The findings from these studies and the methods Luria used to generate them continue to provide inspiration for empirical research today. For example, a great deal of fruitful work over the last three decades on cross-cultural comparisons of the psychological effects of literacy and schooling stems from the ideas of Vygotsky and Luria.

Contemporary modes of interpreting empirical findings, however, are quite different from what Vygotsky and Luria used. While accepting genetic analysis as a valuable technique in domains such as sociocultural history and ontogenesis, investigators today are likely to reject Vygotsky's assumption that cross-cultural differences can somehow be reduced to cross-historical differences. At least since the work of Franz Boas (1966) and Edward Sapir (1921), this assumption has been highly suspect in disciplines such as cultural anthropology in the US and Europe. Specifically, any tendency to view cultural differences in terms of historical evolution is likely to lead to charges of Eurocentricism since it is virtually always the case that the perspective used to do the comparing turns out to be at the top of the developmental hierarchy. Even with this caveat, however, Vygotsky's ideas have had a powerful impact on cross-cultural comparisons of cognition and other forms of mental functioning (Cole, 1996).

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Positive Youth Development

Jonathan F. Zaff , ... Emily S. Lin , in Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 2011

B Developmental trajectories of civic engagement

There is limited understanding of the ontogenesis of civic engagement. Without this understanding, there is little known about normative developmental trajectories of civic engagement and how plastic an individual's civic engagement can be. Research on the developmental trajectories of civic engagement mainly uses time-lag designs to examine how individuals of different ages develop across years. For instance, those transitioning to adulthood have become increasingly less likely to engage in a variety of civic behaviors over the past three decades ( Flanagan, Levine, & Settersten, 2009; Syvertsen, Wray-Lake, Flanagan, Osgood, & Briddell, 2011). Few studies have examined the developmental trajectories of civic engagement for individuals over time, which provide insights into the ontogenetic development of civic engagement, not just the effect of interventions or life experiences that alter young people's civic paths.

The vast majority of intraindividual trajectory studies have focused on whether one's participation in civic activities, not deeper civic engagement, at one time point is linked to future civic participation. In their life span study of civic development, Jennings and Stoker (2002, 2004) followed a sample of youth for more than 30 years, examining how and why individuals participated in civic activities and developed civic competencies and attitudes. The researchers found that stability in political attitudes was more a norm than an exception, with those who were civically active earlier in life having more stability throughout life. In other studies, student activists have been found to continue to participate in an array of political activities and to show persistent in political attitudes and ideology two or more decades later (Braungart & Braungart, 1990; Fendrich & Lovoy, 1988; McAdam, 1989). Others have conducted long-term longitudinal studies, with data typically collected once every 10 years, showing high persistence in partisanship and ideology well into adulthood (Alwin, Cohen, & Newcomb, 1991; Alwin & Krosnick, 1991; Sears & Funk, 1999).

A few researchers have studied the continuity of civic engagement from adolescence into young adulthood, consistently showing that participation during early, middle, or late adolescence is related to civic participation in young adulthood, whether volunteering in one's community or participating in electoral politics (Hart, Donnelly, Youniss, & Atkins, 2007; Metz & Youniss, 2005; Smith, 1999; Zaff, Malanchuk, & Eccles, 2008). Further, a recent cross-sectional study found civic participation, knowledge, skills, efficacy, and interest plateau at approximately age 16 (Hart & Atkins, 2010).

As seen in the above studies on stability, what we know about civic trajectories is primarily based on studies of trajectories of civic participation (and political ideology) that typically include only one or two time points during adolescence. Understanding the ways that multiple aspects of civic engagement develop throughout adolescence might provide clues into effective ways to optimize civic engagement during adolescence, which, as suggested by the stability studies, should result in life-long civic engagement. In an analysis of the trajectories of AEC and its components using data from the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development (Zaff, Kawashima-Ginsberg, Lin, Lamb, & Balsano, in press), the various components of AEC (civic participation, civic duty, civic self-efficacy, and neighborhood connection) had different starting points in early adolescence as well as different slopes (see Figure 1). The components all showed relatively gradual upward slopes, with civic efficacy having the steepest slope and neighborhood connection not changing significantly over the four waves of data. Interestingly, civic participation had a much lower starting point than the other constructs, illustrating the benefit of considering multiple components of civic engagement. By the 11th grade, youth appear to believe that they have a duty to effect change in their communities as well as feeling efficacious to effect change. However, the slope for civic participation is not very steep and stays well below the levels for the other AEC components. Thus, there might be a gap between connection to one's neighborhood, sense of duty to effect change in that neighborhood, and sense of efficacy to effect that change on the one hand and actual participation on the other hand. In a separate analysis of the same data, Zaff et al. (2011) found, using pattern-centered trajectory analysis, that youth followed a high stable, medium stable, or low stable civic engagement path throughout adolescence. That is, once youth were on a civic path, they did not deviate from that path, consistent with the other stability studies that those who are engaged remain engaged.

Fig. 1. Predicted values of AEC outcomes by time.

Taken together, these studies of stability or persistence show that those who are civically active at one period in their lives are very likely to remain civically active throughout their lives. Although these studies have not necessarily examined whether other aspects of civic engagement have similar stability within individuals, we would hypothesize that this level of stability suggests deeper engagement. The question arises, then, why do some individuals begin on these trajectories of civic activity, while others do not? Because civic attributes and experiences during adolescence predict continued civic engagement into later adulthood (Jennings & Stoker, 2004), adolescence may provide a unique opportunity to encourage civic engagement throughout the life course. In the following section, we consider the theories for understanding the development of civic engagement and the factors that appear to predict this development.

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Confluence and Divergence in Empirical Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Mainstream Psychology

Gerald C. Cupchik , Andrew S. Winston , in Cognitive Ecology, 1996

1 Everyday Structure

Psychologists have been very interested in the ontogenesis of percepts and concepts. Thus far we have seen that physical–sensory information is processed prior to semantic information in accordance with the epistemologial position of British empiricism. A related theoretical position holds that percepts develop from the global in the direction of the particular (Navon, 1977). The notion of global-precedence in stimulus decoding was first suggested in the 1920s by researchers of the Aktualgenese (perceptual microgenesis) school who believed that perception is intrinsically structured (see Flavell & Draguns, 1957). Neisser (1967) popularized the notion that a preattentive stage of global processing is followed by a focal attentive stage during which the details of stimuli are identified. A merging of these viewpoints implies that physical–sensory information is processed holistically, followed by specific (i.e., semantic) stimulus identification.

The problem of hierarchy in everyday processing (see Dodwell, 1993) is defined in terms of the level of generality of the initial and subsequent analyses. Stimuli are decomposed rather than built up (Navon, 1977) according to the global-precedence hypothesis. A first-pass cursory assessment of global properties or relationships can direct subsequent fine-grained local examination of a stimulus. Patterns possessing good form are processed faster when they are the target level of analysis (Sebrechts & Fragala, 1985). Although this process is useful because it takes advantage of low-resolution information, the nature of globality is not immediately apparent. Is it a product of Gestalt properties such as proximity and good configuration, or do global and local structures differ in terms of complexity, familiarity, or salience?

Kimchi's (1992) discussion of the role of stimulus properties stresses the importance of qualities such as relative size. Two levels of structure are distinguished; local elements and global configurations. The two levels are perceptually independent when the overall form of a pattern is associated with many small texture elements. In art this is exemplified by pointillism (i.e., the postimpressionist painting of Seurat), wherein innumerable colored dots are distinct from the overall configurations of objects. In patterns comprising a few large elements, the local elements are perceived as figural parts of the overall form (as in a figural sculptural composition by Henry Moore involving two or three interrelated bodily components).

An asymmetry in hierarchical patterns shows that local "elements can exist without a global configuration, but a global configuration cannot exist without local elements" (Kimchi, 1992, p. 33). Kimchi concluded that globality has to do with hierarchical structures and implies that properties of "higher" (i.e., larger) levels are more "global" than those at lower levels. The global advantage that favors a higher (i.e., larger) level is revealed at earlier stages of perceptual processing because of its relative salience (i.e., size).

The approach to hierarchies adopted by mainstream theorists to account for everyday perception is highly associationist. Nodes and arcs at the top of a hierarchy are more global than those at a lower level (Palmer, 1975), and comparisons are made in terms of these nodes (see Navon, 1977). Although size and relative salience of configuration are significant from the viewpoint of pure perception, this physicalist analysis is restricted to isolated images. These are also properties imposed on artificial stimuli by "detached" experimenters for whom relations among the elements are operationally defined (Giorgi, 1970). Comparative relations founded on contextualized meaning (and changing meanings) are more important for a theoretical examination of aesthetic process.

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Ecocultural Theories of Development

A. Bame Nsamenang , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015

Social Ontogenesis: Nsamenang

Nsamenang (1992) developed a theoretical position termed social ontogenesis , based on an indigenous West African conception that is phrased within an ecocultural perspective. His ideas are inspired by the writings of various Africans trained in philosophy and the humanities (e.g., Mbiti, 1990; Moumouni, 1968) and grounded in a combination of systematic observational research and his own personal experience of the socialization practices of the rural versus urban Nso communities in Western Cameroon (Nsamenang and Lamb, 1993, 1995). His formulation of social ontogenesis is rooted in a widely shared West African worldview. It posits the growth of social selfhood through a series of phases, each characterized by a distinctive developmental task, defined within the framework of the culture's primarily socioaffective, developmental agenda. The theory of social ontogenesis (Nsamenang, 1992, 2004, 2012a) points out how, beginning early in life and through developmental stages, African children are active in the life of their families and societies as well as in self-care and self-learning. This theory presents human development as partly determined by the social ecology in which the development occurs and by how African children, especially in sibling and peer settings, learn from each other in peer cultures.

The seminal concept of this theory is sociogenesis, defined as individual development that is explained more in terms of socially observed markers and culturally perceived tasks but less on biological unfolding, although social ontogenetic thinking does not preclude nature; it assumes that biology underpins social ontogenesis (Nsamenang, 2006a). Ngaujah (2003) has interpreted Nsamenang's theoretical approach as revealing the social and affective nature of the environment on the child's cognitive and social learning.

The first phase of social ontogenesis is the ceremony of naming, which projects the kind of socialized being the neonate should become. The major developmental task of the second phase is success in social priming: babies are cuddled and teased to smile along with adults; parents and other caregivers offer infants food items and playthings, and lure them both verbally and through nonverbal communication to return the 'gifts.' This is a preliminary step toward induction into the 'sharing and exchange norms' that bond siblings and the entire social system together. For example, among the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples in Zambia, Mtonga (2012) interprets such interactions of adults with toddlers, as aimed at cultivating generosity and preventing the development of greediness or selfishness.

The next phase, roughly corresponding with childhood, is termed the period of social apprenticing in which the principal developmental task is to recognize, cognize, and rehearse social roles that pertain to three hierarchical spheres of life: household, network, and public. Much of the responsibility for stimulation and guidance in this phase of early childhood development is assigned to preadolescent and adolescent children in the family and the neighborhood. The delegation of responsibility for care and socialization of younger children from adults to preadolescents and adolescents serves the function of priming the emergence of social responsibility. These priming strategies embedded in traditional African child-rearing practices have important implications for the design of culturally appropriate forms of intervention to optimize developmental opportunities for children in contemporary Africa (Nsamenang, 2009). Indeed, in many African communities with a subsistence economy, far from constituting a form of exploitation or abuse, caregiving responsibilities assigned to preadolescents and adolescents are better understood as part of "an indigenous educational strategy that keeps children in contact with existential realities and the activities of daily life [that] represents the participatory component of social integration" (Nsamenang, 1992: p. 157).

By positioning children as emerging into levels of selfhood, implying the unfolding of biological potentialities and social competencies, Africans tacitly acknowledge that self-concept and agency evolve with a maturing self-consciousness that accords a sense of self-direction and agentive search for or choice of the resources and exposures that increasingly differentiate and polish self-identity and goal-directed behavior toward desired or imagined personal status, either of sovereign individuality or relational individuality (Kagitcibasi, 2007; Nsamenang, 2004).

African parents sensitize children from an early age to seek out others from whom to extract local knowledge and situated intelligences (Ogbu, 1992) and in so doing clarify who they are, more so within sibling and peer spaces than with adults. Children extort the social, emotional, practical, cognitive, relational values and other norms ingrained in the activity settings of the home, society, and peer cultures more through their contextual embedment and active participation and less through explicit adult instruction or prodding. In so doing, they 'graduate' from one activity setting and participative sector of the peer culture to another, steadily maturing toward adult identity and roles (Nsamenang, 2012a). Zimba (2002: p. 94) described one instance of self-definition with the Zulu community of South Africa, as nurturing umuntu umuntu ngabantu, which literally translates into "a person is only a person with other people." This relational view of identity development downplays lonesome individuation, implying that a sense of self cannot be attained or adequately understood without reference to the 'community' of others in which it is embedded. Concepts of place identity and place attachment accentuate the need to incorporate context into theory building and research agendas.

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Lifespan Development, Theory of

U.M. Staudinger , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

3 Lifespan Psychology: Definitions, Meta-theoretical Perspectives, and Theoretical Claims

Lifespan developmental psychology or lifespan psychology deals with the study of individual development (ontogenesis) as it extends across the entire life course. Influenced by evolutionary perspectives, neofunctionalism, and contextualism, lifespan psychology defines development as selective age-related change in adaptive capacity (Baltes 1997). In particular, this adaptive capacity involves the acquisition, maintenance, transformation, and attrition in psychological functions and structures. The focus on selection and selective adaptation highlights that development neither is a uniform nor integrated phenomenon across different domains of functioning and across time. This implies that development is conceived as a developing system comprising a multidimensional and multifunctional dynamic. Owing to selective adaptation, different parts of the developing system develop at different rates, in different directions, for different purposes, and may show continuities as well as discontinuities. A further consequence of this definition is that at any point in the lifespan, development is considered as being constituted by gains and losses. With increasing age, the proportion of gains to losses changes in favor of losses. Criteria of what constitutes a gain and what a loss can be of a subjective and objective nature. Losses, in the sense of selection and of crises, are even considered crucial motors of development (Montada et al. 1992, Riegel 1976).

Considering one domain of psychological functioning as an example may help to illustrate this terminological maze. Take for instance, the lifespan development of intellectual functioning. Two main components (multidimensionality) with very different developmental trajectories (multidirectionality) have been distinguished. The two components are the mechanics and the pragmatics of the mind or fluid and crystallized intelligence (e.g., Baltes et al. 1998). The mechanics refer to cognition as an expression of the neurophysiological architecture of the mind as it evolved during biological evolution. The cognitive mechanics are assessed by tasks of reaction speed or inferencing. In contrast, the pragmatics of cognition are associated with the bodies of knowledge available from and mediated through culture. The cognitive pragmatics are operationalized using tests of verbal ability or knowledge. While losses emerge in the mechanics of the mind quite early in development (after 25 years of age), the pragmatics are characterized first by gains and later by stability until quite late in adulthood. The mechanics and pragmatics of the mind also illustrate the notion of the developing system, as they do not operate in isolation but complement each other to support proactive, selective adaptation.

Besides multidimensionality and multidirectionality, the concepts of multifunctionality, equifinality, and multicausality are crucial when taking a dynamic-system view on lifespan development. Multifunctionality relates to the fact that one and the same developmental change can serve multiple purposes. Research on the concept of dependency provides impressive examples for how in old age, dependency not only implies the loss of autonomy but also the gain of social contact (Baltes 1996). Equifinality in turn refers to the notion that multiple roads can lead to the same developmental outcome. The example of intellectual development illustrates that one and the same behavioral outcome, such as a given cognitive performance, can be attained by using aspects of the mechanics of the mind if one is not used to that cognitive task or it can be accomplished by accessing one's experience with the task that is by referring to pragmatic aspects of the mind.

Multidimensionality and multidirectionality of development highlight the fact that within one individual there is variability in functioning across different domains. Lifespan psychology, however, is also interested in the intraindividual variability of functioning within one domain across time. This is an aspect of behavior that other subdisciplines of psychology often have devaluated as error variance. Lifespan psychology takes intraindividual variability seriously and considers it as an indicator of the plasticity of development. The notion of plasticity implies that any given developmental outcome is but one of numerous possible outcomes. The search for the conditions, range and limits as well as age-related changes in plasticity is fundamental to the study of lifespan development (Lerner 1984).

Over the years, systematic work on the concept of plasticity necessitated further differentiation. One involved the distinction between baseline reserve capacity and developmental reserve capacity (e.g., Kliegl et al. 1989). Baseline reserve capacity refers to the current level of plasticity available to individuals. For instance, how many words from a list of 20 can a person remember. Developmental reserve capacity specifies what is possible in principle given optimizing interventions. That is, how many words can a person remember after learning a mnemonic technique and practicing this technique for extended periods of time. Such training studies have found that there are impressive intellectual training gains well into old age.Training studies comparing young and old participants, however, have also demonstrated that the training efficiency or developmental reserve capacity is much reduced in old age (Lindenberger and Baltes 1995).

Developmental reserves decline with age. But it is not only the amount of reserves that changes but also the functions that they serve. With increasing age, reserves are less used for growth and more and more for maintenance, recovery and eventually also for the management of loss (Staudinger et al. 1995).

The concepts of plasticity and reserve capacity also highlight the contextual interdependencies of development. Ontogenetic and historical contextualism is another key element of lifespan psychology (Riegel 1976). Contextualism stands in contrast to mechanist or organismic models of development. Lifespan contextualism is related to ecological–contextualist perspectives as well as action-theoretical positions that emphasize the importance of both individual and social–contextual factors in the regulation of development (Smith and Baltes 1999). According to lifespan contextualism, individuals exist in contexts that create and limit opportunities of individual pathways. But individuals also select and create their own contexts.

Contexts evolve according to at least three different logics (Baltes et al. 1980). One is the normative age-graded logic, the second is the history-graded logic, and finally third there is an idiosyncratic or nonnormative logic. The age-graded logic refers to those biological and environmental aspects that, because of their dominant age correlation, shape individuals in relatively normative ways. Examples are developmental tasks such as starting school or retirement, or the age-based processes of physical maturation (puberty, menopause). The history-graded logic concerns those variations in ontogenetic development that are due to historical circumstances. Take for instance, the historical evolution of the educational system or the effect of war on ontogenetic development. Finally, the non-normative logic reflects individual–idiosyncratic events of a biological or environmental nature, such as winning the lottery or losing a leg in an accident. All three logics also interact in their shaping of ontogenetic development. In order to understand or predict development, age-graded, history-graded, and person-specific factors have to be taken into account. However, besides contributing to similarities in development, these logics, as Dannefer has argued, also contribute to systematic interindividual variations owing to, for instance, social class.

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Advances in Child Development and Behavior

C.J. Brainerd , V.F. Reyna , in Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 2002

I Introduction

The science of cognitive development is divisible into two broad fields of inquiry: (a) the ontogenesis of basic processes and capabilities (e.g., attention, memory, processing speed, inhibition) that support higher reasoning and (b) the ontogenesis of types of higher reasoning (e.g., decision making, deductive inference, judgment, problem solving). The paradigms that are central to research in the two fields are quite different, of course (e.g., free recall vs. mathematical problem solving), as are the theoretical assumptions that guide experimentation. At a deeper level, however, theories in both fields have long shared a core attribute—namely, they have been unitary theories. By "unitary theories," we mean theories in which an overriding developmental bottom line is posited; that is, a unifying theme or principle that characterizes what development is moving away from and what it is evolving toward. In the memory sphere, the unifying theme is that development moves away from recollections that are sketchy, distorted representations of experience and toward recollections that are detailed, veridical representations. In the reasoning sphere, the unifying theme is that development moves away from reasoning operations that are intuitive, qualitative, or heuristic toward reasoning operations that are analytical, computational, or logical.

From the perspective of parsimony, unitary conceptions are the proper place to begin theory building. However, research in mainstream cognitive psychology has long since established that some basic facts of adult memory and reasoning pose serious difficulties for such conceptions. In adults, both memory and reasoning seem to be characterized by well-articulated dual systems that process different types of information in seemingly contradictory and incompatible ways. In the memory sphere, the same adults who exhibit highly veridical recall and recognition of experience also display powerful illusions of recollection for events that were never experienced (for a review, see Roediger, 1996). In the reasoning sphere, the same adults who provide analytical, logical solutions to certain problem-solving tasks also provide intuitive, heuristic solutions when the tasks are framed in slightly different ways (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981, 1983).

Such evidence poses two fundamental challenges to theories of cognitive development: first, to formulate testable theoretical models of these dual systems and, second, to spell out their developmental trajectories. Fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990a; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995; Reyna, Lloyd, & Brainerd, 2001) is an attempt to respond to these challenges by integrating two disparate approaches to the study of memory (the constructivist and verbal-learning traditions) and by uniting two similarly disparate approaches to the study of reasoning (the intuitionist and logicist traditions). We survey the current status of fuzzy-trace theory in this article.

In section II, we sketch two prominent interpretations of memory–reasoning relations in cognitive development that preceded fuzzy-trace theory, the necessity hypothesis and the constructivist hypothesis, and that were predicated on unitary conceptions of memory and reasoning. We summarize developmental findings that disconfirmed both interpretations and motivated fuzzy-trace theory as an alternative approach. In section III, we consider dual-process conceptions of reasoning, memory, and their relations, as posited in fuzzy-trace theory. Research that bears on these conceptions is also reviewed. In section IV, we examine four domains of research that have been active venues for evaluating the explanatory and predictive capabilities of fuzzy-trace theory: (a) developmental cognitive neuroscience studies of false memory; (b) studies of false memory in brain-damaged patients; (c) studies of judgment and decision-making errors in adults; and (d) studies of dual-retrieval processes in child and adult recall.

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Piaget's Theory of Human Development and Education

J.J. Vonèche , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

Piaget's theory of human development and education is based on the assumption that the origin and nature of knowledge lies in the experimental study of its evolution during ontogenesis, considered as a sort of embryology of knowledge in which knowledge is the cognitive equivalent and prolongation by other means of biological adaptation. Intelligence takes the place of organism but the functional poles of adaptation remain the same, they are assimilation and accommodation. Whereas they are metabolic in biological adaptation, they are abstract and logical in intelligence. Cognitive metabolism is assurred by rhythms, regulations, and mental operations. It starts off with a period of adualism between the knowing subject and the object and continues into successive stages of progressive differentiation and integration from direct perceptual and motoric action to representation and logical categories leading to hypothetico-deductive forms of reasoning. This process is constructive: it is neither given by the environment as assumed by empiricism nor born fully-fledged from the mind of the subject as in the nativistic hypothesis, but it is built up, stage by stage, by a mechanism of equilibration between mental structures and the properties of the universe that are gradually discovered thanks to ever increasing powers of understanding.

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Cultural Dimensions of Cognition: A Multiplex, Dynamic System of Constraints and Possibilities

Robert Serpell , A. Wade Boykin , in Thinking and Problem Solving, 1994

D The Significance of History

The sociohistorical school of thought that has emerged from a renewed interest in the writings of Vygotsky (1978) has articulated one account of the relations among ontogenesis, enculturation, and cultural change over the course of social history (Forman et al., 1993; LCHC, 1983; Moll, 1990; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1985). While we see much to commend this perspective, we also detect two major areas of difficulty. First, the explicit parallels drawn between diachronic change at multiple levels invite the drawing of potentially misleading analogies between evolution, history, and ontogenesis. Children develop from immaturity toward maturity and in some domains, at least, generally achieve a modicum of progress. But it does not follow that societies generally develop in the same progressive sense.

As Scribner (1985) has argued, it is necessary at the very least to acknowledge that the histories of particular societies constitute a separate level of analysis from the broader changes in human culture over the period from stone-age to iron-age technology, which in turn is best considered as discontinuous from the period of prehominid evolution. The temptation to search for examples in the contemporary world of "residual," stone-age cultures that can be treated as a "zero-point" on some continuum of cultural evolution (Konner, 1981) reflects the endurance of mythological themes in Western social scientific theorizing (LCHC, 1983; Wilmsen, 1990).

What is needed is a theoretical framework that acknowledges the possibility of "progress" within culturally structured contexts, without ordering those contexts along a continuum of progress. While the international interdependence of the modern world makes a radical cultural relativism untenable for many widely valued purposes, we nevertheless consider that understanding a less privileged and prestigious sociocultural system in its own terms is an essential starting point or bridgehead (Horton, 1982) for constructive international communication among different cultural groups, and (as we shall explain in more detail in Section VIII) for unleashing the competencies of individuals socialized in a "minority" culture when they are called upon to operate within a relatively culturally alien, "mainstream" context.

In our view, the transcendent organizing themes that characterize a given cultural system arise from a complex interplay among the patterns of historically accumulated semiotic resources, technological practices, and systems of social organization (Serpell, in press). Ong's (1958) account of the web of consequences of the proliferation of printed texts, Merchant's (1980) account of the Renaissance scientific program of control over nature, Weber's (1958) account of the Protestant Ethic, and Berlin's (1956) account of the Enlightenment philosophy, each illustrate the complexity of these relations for a salient dimension of European cultural tradition that has exerted a powerful influence on the contemporary Euro-American culture.

Although there is a good deal of diversity among African philosophers, many of them have commented on the contrast between some of these themes in European culture and the ontological, epistemological, and axiological perspectives indigenous to African cultures (Abraham, 1962; Mbiti, 1970; Wiredu, 1980). Boykin (1983) has identified several major lines of convergence among the works of social historians, anthropologists, educators, and philosophers, which have been taken up within the framework of Black Psychology (Jones, 1979; Nobles, 1976) as a basis for articulating the distinctive character of an Afro-cultural ethos, within which he distinguishes nine salient dimensions: spirituality, harmony, movement, verve, affect, communalism, expressive individualism, orality, and social time perspective.

This profile stands in contrast to the profiles of other cultures not in terms of the absolute presence or absence of a given feature, but as a total configuration with a particular hierarchy of values. Unlike the more ecologically determined accounts of cultural practices favored by other cross-cultural theorists (e.g., Berry, 1971; Levine, 1990; Segall et al., 1990; Whiting, 1963), Boykin's conceptual approach emphasizes value-laden meaning systems, and derives its validation in part from philosophical, metatheoretical considerations. Further, the specific contents of the nine dimensions constitute distilled interpretations derived from a diverse and wide-ranging literature, yet may be subject to refinement or more substantial modification in the future in light of empirical data or other forms of evidence.

The second difficulty that we see with the neo-Vygotskian account of the interface between culture and cognition is a tendency to emphasize human actions in the physical world and economic activities. Like the concept of social progress, technological mastery over the physical world was a salient cultural theme in the society to which Vygotsky's theorizing was addressed. But this may not adequately reflect the hierarchy of values that informs other societies' perspectives on child development.

It is probably no accident that many of the cross-cultural studies grounded in the sociohistorical school have focused on activities related to distinctive features of each society's material culture, such as, for example, pottery, weaving, and cooking. So long as these activities are presented as merely illustrative of the influence of a culturally informed knowledge base on cognitive performance, there is no reason to give greater attention to one than to another. But when extrapolating to the wider domain of public policy, there is a danger in assuming that the focus is itself free of cultural bias. Interpretations of history can no more reasonably aspire to present an Olympian perspective (Berrien, 1967), or a "view from nowhere" (Nagel, 1986), than can cross-cultural theories of psychology (Serpell, 1990). Spiritual values and social processes are just as integral to the understanding of human history as technological efficiency, and a less progressivist ideology than that which informs much of Western public policy would likely pay more attention to the connections between socialization practices and education on one hand and the quality of children's social and spiritual development on the other.

It is not only theorists and policy makers whose cultural preoccupations tend to narrow their understanding of cultural dimensions of cognition. In the field of applied psychology, there is also a tendency to overlook the influence of culture on the practitioner's technical activities. Sternberg (1984) argues cogently for the necessity of complementing his "two-process" and "componential" sub-theories of intelligence with a third, "contextual" sub-theory. But his account focuses only on context as the socializing environment of the person whose intelligence is to be assessed. An additional dimension of context surrounds the activity of assessment—a context that implicates not only the subject of assessment but also the author. The very agenda of assessment, as well as the agenda of measurement and the agenda of theorizing are all culturally informed agendas. They would have no meaning to an audience that is situated in a radically different cultural system (e.g., that of a relatively isolated village with a close-knit, kinship-based community, a small-scale, subsistence economy, and no system of formal schooling).

This culturally contextualized account of the process of assessment meshes with Sternberg's (1984) relativistic treatment of the socializing environment of the person whose intelligence is to be assessed as follows. Not only does the assessor need to know about where the subject is coming from and the directions in which her/his developmental niche is steering her development in order to know what to measure, but the assessor also needs to pose the reflexive questions, "What is the cultural meaning of the activity in which I am engaged? How can my assessment serve as a guide to action in the life of this individual? How does my perspective on this individual's behavior relate to that of the subject and to that of the various audiences that I am in a position to address (the parents, the teachers, the state's various social service agencies, etc.)?"

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