The success of developmental psychology

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The success of developmental psychology and its efforts to understand the development of thought in the first year of infancy

In spite of their obvious impotence, newborns come to this world ready to collect the information they need to give sense of their new environment; their heritage which is determined at the time of conception has supply them with the already developed capacities of their own specie as well as a unique set of genes that transforms them into individuals. However to predict the course of life of an individual is not the aim of developmental psychology , but to understand the general rules of development, in this case the development of thought during the first year of life commonly characteristic to the human race. Soon we will see how explanations about this development differ. Although each of them has incremented our understanding of the mysterious process of development , none of them on its own can describe what is the exact mechanism of the first steps given by human mind. The psychology of thought development has been expanded in many directions during the last couple of decades. Old theories have been reinterpreted and new theories have come to clarify what it used to be unexplorable places of development, what makes this area growing in complexity.

It is a real big challenge to try to understand the development of thinking and reasoning and the origins of them. There are many aspects of development involved in this process of thought and all of them must be studied carefully in order to achieve a comprehension of the first steps that the human mind give when it starts to work. Many areas influence this complex machine like biology, sensorial development and perception, attention (like the reason why babies find some things more interesting than others ), basic learning processes and behaviour, memory, human motivation and emotion and finally thought and language.

All the areas of mind development I exposed before have been studied under different theoretical perspectives. It seems partly hard to compare all them since, each one of them focus the areas of development from a rather different point of view. All of them more or less agree that human development is regular and behaviour can be potentially predicted , and that (with the exceptions of empiricists) the infant is relatively active in his own development; but as I said the focus changes. Some times they can be describing the same process in different terms ; as I see it, these terms reflect the vision of their own theory and that can bring to confusion.
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I can take as an example for this Piaget's theory of the permanence of objects (Piaget, 1969) and the study of the psychoanalist Melanie Klein who made a study about "the baby's inner world and how it comes to be populated with objects based on the experiences arising in the baby's

relationship with her mother" ( Oates , 1994, p.288).Both theories hold parallel similarities in the explanation of how the child constructs actively his own world based in the relations she has with outside elements. However the purpose of Piaget and the cognitive theories is to ...

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