This article builds on a qualitative study of interactions and negotiations with respect to existential questions in an ECEC department with children from 3 to 6 years of age, as part of a larger empirical study on the same topic. In the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research's 2017 curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC),…

Researchers from different disciplines (e.g., physiological, psychological, philosophical) have investigated motivation using multiple approaches. For example, in physiology (the scientific study of the normal function in living systems such as biology), researchers may use "electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain, the recording of…

Mirror neurons are increasingly recognized as a crucial substrate for many developmental processes, including imitation and social learning. Although there has been considerable progress in describing their function and localization in the primate and adult human brain, we still know little about their ontogeny. The idea that mirror neurons result…

This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki's pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children's biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children's patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for…

Global accounts of cognitive development, best illustrated by Piaget's theory, dominated the field until the 1970s and 1980s, when they were gradually superseded by domain-specific accounts. In this article I present evidence suggesting that both global and domain-specific processes make important contributions to cognitive development, and I…