Based on the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society: The Study of Knowledge and Development, this volume of explorations by anthropologists, biologists, historians of science, paleontologists and psychologists seeks further understanding of the mechanisms of mental development. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny, ontogeny and history of mentation - most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing and organization of thought, symbol and value development. As it has been throughout its history, the guiding purpose of this comparative research continues to be determining the possibilities that evolution opens up for the ontogenic origins, development and history of mentation, as well as the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development. The contributors focused on three comparative developments for which there is increasing data, cognitive, social and cultural development. The varied findings and approaches reported in this volume reveal that comparative research on mental development is in a phase of differentiation and integration.
Far from being global and fused, the comparative study of mental development is a field of diverse empirical phenomena, scholarly topics and theoretical perspectives on its evolution and history.