Flynn, Laland, Kendal and Kendal's article (this issue) plays a valuable role in two ways. First, it demonstrates how developmental psychology can learn lessons from the latest research on developmental niche construction within evolutionary biology. Secondly, for those psychologists whose main focus is the cognitive mechanisms by which humans…

Instead of viewing organisms and individuals as passive recipients of their biological, ecological, and cultural inheritances, the developmental niche construction theory and the biocultural co-construction framework both emphasize that the individual's agency plays a key role in regulating how environmental and sociocontextual influences may…

For over 50 years, developmental psychologists have conducted research around the world to understand the relation between culture and cognition. In fact, psychologists have been interested in this topic for over a century. In the late 1800s, Wundt introduced "Elements of Folk Psychology," the study of how culture becomes part of higher…

The authors share the belief that there is great potential for developmental science in bringing the ideas of Niche Construction Theory (NCT), as developed in evolutionary biology, into conversation with Vygotskian-inspired theories such as cultural-historical and activity theories, distributed cognition, and embodied cognition, although from…

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). Do 9-month-old infants construe the direct reach and grasp of a single object, sitting alone on a table, as a goal-directed action? Based on their current findings and a previous study, Hernik and Southgate (this issue) make the rather surprising suggestion…

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). What do infants know about agents' goals? The authors see this issue consisting of two closely related questions. First, what is an agent to infants? Second, how do infants attribute goals to agents? Hernik and Southgage (H&S) focused on the second question.…

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). The author puts forward two points concerning the paper by Hernik and Southgate (this issue). She will discuss first how and why the converging findings of recent studies, including the one by Hernik and Southgate, extend knowledge about the nature of…

This reply article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). This is a response to the commentaries on Hernik and Southgate (2012) by Biro (2012), Kuhlmeier and Robson (2012) and Luo and Choi (2012). Both L&C and K&R reject the authors' conclusion that an absence of a Woodward-effect in some single-object versions of the…

Morton and Harper (2007 ) argue that research presented in support of a bilingual advantage in the development of executive control has been confounded with social class, the actual mechanism for group differences. As evidence, they report a study in which a small group of monolingual and bilingual 6- and 7-year-olds performed similarly on a Simon…

I advance the hypothesis that the earliest phases of language acquisition--the developmental transition from an initial universal state of language processing to one that is language-specific--requires social interaction. Relating human language learning to a broader set of neurobiological cases of communicative development, I argue that the…

This commentary reviews five articles that apply Bayesian ideas to psychological development, some with psychology experiments, some with computational modeling, and some with both experiments and modeling. The reviewed work extends the current Bayesian revolution into tasks often studied in children, such as causal learning and word learning, and…

In this article, we argue that policymakers in America should reference a coherent, comprehensive, and child-centered framework for children. That is, based on an extensive review of the empirical literature on the first two decades of life, we conclude that policies should address the needs of young people throughout the first two decades of…

The articles in this section focus attention on (1) the historical shift in policies that affect the young men of this nation (2) how fatherhood policies and programmatic efforts are expanding and (3) how fatherhood practices and policies could and perhaps should be expanded and elaborated further. These efforts are linked to a growing body of…

The articles in this issue each contribute uniquely to the growing field of adolescent religious and spiritual development. Together, they also illustrate important themes in the field, including the multidimensionality of the domain of religious and spiritual development and a growing emphasis on themes consistent with developmental systems…

Even as the events of September 11, 2001 recede into the past, the need for applied developmental science to lend its expertise to assist with one's understanding of and coping with civilian responses to terrorism has never been greater. What has the field learned from studies of the effects of events of September 11th on children, youths, and…