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Children are different. Not just from each other, but from moment to moment.
You noticed? Robert Siegler proposes in Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in
Children’s Thinking (Oxford University Press, USA, $35, ISBN 0 19 507787
3) that it’s time developmental psychologists paid attention to this fact, and
that they should shift their attention from stepped stages of development to how
capabilities change, compete and evolve. Siegler has the germ of an excellent
connectionist idea, compatible with Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield’s
ideas on epicentres of neural activation. She explained her ideas in Journey to
the Centre of the Mind (Cassell, 1996). Siegler needs to read Greenfield, and a
lot more about evolution, before he gets it quite right.