Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world’s foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child’s behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner’s groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

This book focuses on a recent, important psychological theory of autism, the 'theory of mind' hypothesis. This claims that children with autism fail to develop the ability to think about mental states in the normal way, and thus fail to understand behavior in terms of mental states. In current terminology, they are impaired in the development of a 'theory of mind'. This psychological deficit is held to underlie some of the key feature of the syndrome: the abnormalities in social and communication development. The editors have collected together both the evidence and the controversies surrounding the theory, and present these as a valuable debate about the nature of what is widely recognized as the most severe childhood psychiatric disorder. The chapters are written by scholars from a variety of disciplines (developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy, psycholinguistics, primatology, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis). The book stands as an illustration of the mutual influence of studies of the mind from the prespectives of normality and pathology.