Agency and Cognitive Development

Children of different ages live in different worlds. This is partly due to learnin as children learn more and more about the world they experience it in different ways. But learning cannot be the whole story or else children could learn anything at any age - which they cannot.In a startlingly original proposal, Michael Tomasello argues that children of different ages live and learn in different worlds because their capacities to cognitively represent and operate on their experience change in significant ways over the first years of life. These capacities change because they are elements in a maturing cognitive architecture evolved for agentive decision making and action, including in shared agencies in which individuals must mentally coordinate with others. The developmental proposal is that from birth infants are goal-directed agents who cognitively represent and learn about actualities; at 9 -12 months toddlers become intentional (and joint) agents who also imaginatively and perspe