Based on the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society this book represents cutting-edge work on the mechanisms of cognitive social and cultural development. The authors-anthropologists biologists historians of science paleontologists and psychologists-believe that a rebirth is in progress relating to the study of these mental developments. This volume seeks to illuminate this rebirth. The varied findings and approaches reported reveal that contemporary comparative research on mental development is in a phase of differentiation and integration. Far from being global and fused this comparative study is a flowering field of diverse disciplinary approaches empirical phenomena scholarly topics and theoretical perspectives. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny ontogeny and history of mentation-most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages velocity extent sequencing organization of thought symbol and value development. The world's leading authorities on the subject discuss the implications of the study of evolution for our models of the ontogenetic origins development and history of mentation as well as determine the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development. Bringing the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans this book will be of interest cognitive developmentalists primatologists and comparitive psychologists. . Language: English