Cognitive-Perceptual Development in Infancy: Setting for the Seventies.

Abstract

The charge to this year's conference authors was to look into the last five years and report the significant events which had occurred in the topical area they were to review. I accepted this charge for the area of cognitive-perceptual development. To accomplish this task I found I needed to develop some operating definition of what was to be considered a significant event in the area of cognitive-perceptual development in infancy. I decided to process the many candidates for this degree of significance by asking myself whether I thought they would have a major impact on future research in the area or perhaps even have a direct effect on infant cognitive perceptual development itself. I then took this incisive divining rod in hand and turned to the past five years. You will perhaps be as surprised as I was to find that in applying my criterion of significance to the events of the past five years, I managed to uncover four significant events but none of these was a product of a study of infants. Before I proceed to describe these four significant events, let me give you an outline of the structure of this paper. The four events will be pre sented briefly and it will be argued that they provide a setting which will exert an important directional pressure on the area of cognitive-perceptual research in infancy, a directional pressure which I believe should and will initiate a great deal of research during this coming decade. We will then turn to a discussion of some specific questions this setting will raise for the specific cognitive-perceptual topics of attention, memory, and basic sensory motor schema.