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Digital Audiobook
Agency and Cognitive Development by Michael Tomasello

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Agency and Cognitive Development

Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Publish Date
4 March 2025
Run Time
9 hours 1 minute
Format
Audiobook
$13.95

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What to expect

Children of different ages live in different worlds. This is partly due to learning: as children learn more and more about the world they experience it in different ways. But learning cannot be the whole story or else children could learn anything at any age—which they cannot.



Michael Tomasello argues that children of different ages live and learn in different worlds because their capacities to cognitively represent and operate on their experience change in significant ways over the first years of life. These capacities change because they are elements in a maturing cognitive architecture evolved for agentive decision making and action, including in shared agencies in which individuals must mentally coordinate with others. The developmental proposal is that from birth infants are goal-directed agents who cognitively represent and learn about actualities; at 9-12 months toddlers become intentional (and joint) agents who also imaginatively and perspectively represent and learn about possibilities; and at 3-4 years children become metacognitive (and collective) agents who also metacognitively represent and learn about objective/normative necessities. These developing agentive architectures—originally evolved in humans' evolutionary ancestors for particular types of decision making and action—help to explain why children learn what they do when they do.

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Details

Author
Michael Tomasello
Narrator
Chris Sorensen
Duration
9 hours 1 minute
Release Date
4 March 2025
ISBN
9798331932220
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Genre
Cognition and cognitive psychology, Clinical psychology, Child, developmental and lifespan psychology

Synopsis

Children of different ages live in different worlds. This is partly due to learning: as children learn more and more about the world they experience it in different ways. But learning cannot be the whole story or else children could learn anything at any age—which they cannot.Michael Tomasello argues that children of different ages live and learn in different worlds because their capacities to cognitively represent and operate on their experience change in significant ways over the first years of life. These capacities change because they are elements in a maturing cognitive architecture evolved for agentive decision making and action, including in shared agencies in which individuals must mentally coordinate with others. The developmental proposal is that from birth infants are goal-directed agents who cognitively represent and learn about actualities; at 9-12 months toddlers become intentional (and joint) agents who also imaginatively and perspectively represent and learn about possibilities; and at 3-4 years children become metacognitive (and collective) agents who also metacognitively represent and learn about objective/normative necessities. These developing agentive architectures—originally evolved in humans' evolutionary ancestors for particular types of decision making and action—help to explain why children learn what they do when they do.

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