This volume is a festschrift for Katherine Nelson, an NYU professor who was a pioneer in infant perception and memory. The "mediated mind" is a term coined by Dr. Nelson and it refers to how cognitive development is mediated by the sociocultural context, including language and social interaction. The impact of Nelson's views on the sociocultural basis of cognition and her functionalist perspective on cognitive development are evident in the collection of chapters in this book. The contributors--all leaders in the field of cognitive development--examine ways in which cognition is embedded in everyday, meaningful activities and the role of social context and cultural symbol symptoms, such as language and text influence children's developing concepts and thought. The concept of the mediated mind is examined from a variety of perspectives, including research in concept development, memory development, language learning, the development of literacy, narrative analysis, and children's theory of mind. The significant contribution of this volume is that it addresses all aspects of the mediated mind. Memory--both autobiographical and event-semantic--theory of mind, mental representation, temporality, narrative, and metalinguistic awareness comprise the chapter topics. The breadth of topics represented is a tribute to the impact Nelson's vision has on many developmental "domains." The contributors acknowledge and honor her work. Her theory and research paved the way for the advances in understanding a mediated mind that are evident and that will continue to shape notions of how the human mind develops and evolves within a social, interactive world.

This book discusses the role of language as a cognitive and communicative tool in a child's early development.

In this work the contributors examine ways in which cognition is embedded in everyday, meaningful activities and the role of social context and cultural symbol symptoms, such as language and text influence children's developing concepts and thought.

In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or mediational means that shape both social and individual processes. In considering how these mediational means--in particular, language--emerge in social history and the role they play in organizing the settings in which human beings are socialized, Wertsch achieves fresh insights into essential areas of human mental functioning that are typically unexplored or misunderstood. Although Wertsch's discussion draws on the work of a variety of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, the writings of two Soviet theorists, L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), are of particular significance. Voices of the Mind breaks new ground in reviewing and integrating some of their major theoretical ideas and in demonstrating how these ideas can be extended to address a series of contemporary issues in psychology and related fields. A case in point is Wertsch's analysis of voice, which exemplifies the collaborative nature of his effort. Although some have viewed abstract linguistic entities, such as isolated words and sentences, as the mechanism shaping human thought, Wertsch turns to Bakhtin, who demonstrated the need to analyze speech in terms of how it appropriates the voices of others in concrete sociocultural settings. These appropriated voices may be those of specific speakers, such as one's parents, or they may take the form of social languages characteristic of a category of speakers, such as an ethnic or national community. Speaking and thinking thus involve the inherent process of ventriloquating through the voices of other socioculturally situated speakers. Voices of the Mind attempts to build upon this theoretical foundation, persuasively arguing for the essential bond between cognition and culture.

The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky’s important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English. The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky’s relevance to modern psychological thought.

This book highlights a transition from the study of language and cognition to that of language in cognition. It presents an integrative theory of cognitive development, emphasizing the important role that language plays in taking the two to five year old child to new levels of cognitive operations in memory, forming concepts, categories, processing narratives, and understanding other people's intentions. The author considers biological evolution the source of both language and culture, but she argues that qualitatively different modes of thinking and knowing emerge therefrom.

An exploration of how the unconscious is formed and functions by one of our most renowned experts on emotion and the brain. This book traces the evolution of the concept of the unconscious from an intangible, metapsychological abstraction to a psychoneurobiological function of a tangible brain. An integration of current findings in the neurobiological and developmental sciences offers a deeper understanding of the dynamic mechanisms of the unconscious. The relevance of this reformulation to clinical work is a central theme of Schore's other new book, Right Brain Psychotherapy.