
42nd Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society
Rethinking Cognitive Development
The first of three meetings on Knowledge & Development in the 21st Century
Meeting Organizers: Phil Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson
31 May – 2 June, 2012
JPS 2012 will be the first in a three-conference sequence (2012: Cognitive Development; 2013: Social Development; 2014: Thought and Language) that explore new ways of conceptualizing human development in light of recent advances in other disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, epigenetics, systems theory, evolutionary theory, cultural analyses, and epistemology, among other fields of inquiry). The organizers draw upon these advances to highlight a more holistic, relational view of human beings as dynamic and multidimensional, with analytic foci that are simultaneously behavioral and neural, cognitive and emotional, individual and social. The combined aim of the three meetings is to re-think developmental issues across domains from the perspective of contemporary science.
The first meeting will focus on this emerging view of cognitive development, and explore its varieties and motivations. Questions return to the Society's first purposes: What are the mechanisms of developmental change? How does the environment, including culture, interact with genes and behavior to yield a developing person? What is the role of subjective processes, such as self reflection, in cognitive development? What new ways of modeling cognition and its development are needed to characterize cognitive development as an extremely complex emergent process?
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