Children’s Discovery of the Active Mind

During the past 25 years, a great deal of research and theory has addressed the development of young children’s understanding of mental states such as knowledge, beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.  Although developments in children’s understanding of the mind subsequent to early childhood has received less attention, in recent years a growing body of research has emerged examining understanding of psychological functioning during middle and late childhood. Combined with the literature on adolescent epistemological development, this research provides a broader picture of age-related changes in children’s understanding of the mind.Guided by the goals of describing developmental changes in children’s concepts of cognitive functioning and identifying sources of information that contribute to learning about cognition, Children’s Discovery of the Active Mind organizes empirical literature concerning the development of children’s knowledge of cognitive activities from early childhood to adolescence and presents a conceptual framework that integrates children’s introspective activities with social influences on development.  Bringing together theoretical and empirical work from developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, the author argues that rather than depending upon a single source of information, developmental progress is driven by combinations of children’s conceptual knowledge of mental functioning, children’s phenomenological awareness of their own cognitive activities, and children’s social experience.

From the reviews:“The question of how and when children come to understand their own mental activities and those of others (theory of mind) has generated a large body of research over the last several decades. In Children’s Discovery of the Active Mind … Bradford Pillow seeks to summarize, organize, and conceptualize these voluminous investigations. … Pillow uses the book to put forth his own model of the development of children’s knowledge of cognitive activities. … Pillow obviously wrote for those researching theory of mind.” (David Elkind, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 57 (45), November, 2012)

Bradford Pillow, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at Northern Illinois University. Since receiving his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1986, he has conducted research on the development of metacognition and social cognition in preschool children, elementary school children, and adolescents. His research focuses primarily on children’s ability to infer another person’s knowledge, beliefs, or visual experience,  children’s understanding of cognitive processes such as attention, inference, comprehension, and memory, children’s ability to monitor their own cognitive states, and children’s explanations of another person’s behavior.  Currently, he is Associate Editor for The Journal of Genetic Psychology, and Consulting Editor for Child Development.