How minds change across a lifespan — attachment, language acquisition, theory of mind, and what replicated of stage theory.
11 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Nature of Love
Harry F. Harlow · 1958
Infant rhesus monkeys chose to cling to a soft cloth surrogate mother over a wire one that dispensed their milk, arguing that contact comfort, not…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to Adulthood
Jean Piaget · 1972
Revises Piaget's own stage theory to argue that formal operational thought, once assumed to be a universal achievement of adolescence, actually…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education
G. Stanley Hall · 1904
The founding text of adolescence as a distinct developmental period, arguing it is inherently a time of storm and stress driven by biological…
+6 more at this level
12 of 18 works
Harry F. Harlow
Infant rhesus monkeys chose to cling to a soft cloth surrogate mother over a wire one that dispensed their milk, arguing that contact comfort, not feeding, is the basis of an infant's attachment to its caregiver.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jennifer Paris, Antoinette Ricardo & Dawn Rymond
An open introductory textbook covering physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development from conception through adolescence, presenting the major stage and continuity theories side by side with the evidence that has since qualified each of them.
Alan Kazdin (YaleCourses)
Argues that changing a child's behaviour depends on the antecedents and consequences around it rather than on explanation or punishment, and specifies the reinforcement procedures that follow.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean Piaget
Revises Piaget's own stage theory to argue that formal operational thought, once assumed to be a universal achievement of adolescence, actually depends on the specific content and domain a person has practised reasoning about.
Lawrence Kohlberg & Richard H. Hersh
Summarises the theory that moral reasoning develops through an invariant sequence of six stages, from obedience to a self-chosen ethical principle, driven by cognitive development rather than direct instruction in rules.
Carol Gilligan
Argues Kohlberg's stage sequence was built and validated on male samples and mistakes a care-based moral orientation more common among the women she studied for moral immaturity, rather than a different but equally developed ethic.
Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie & Uta Frith
Using the Sally-Anne false-belief task, finds that autistic children specifically fail to attribute a mistaken belief to another person even when they pass simpler tests, evidence that a distinct mental capacity for representing others' minds can fail on its own.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Renée Baillargeon, Elizabeth S. Spelke & Stanley Wasserman
Using a violation-of-expectation looking-time paradigm, finds five-month-olds look longer at a physically impossible event than a possible one, evidence that infants represent hidden objects as continuing to exist far earlier than Piaget's stage theory predicted.
Eric Turkheimer
Summarises decades of twin and adoption research into three laws: nearly every trait is heritable, growing up in the same family matters less than being genetically related, and a large share of variance in complex traits is left unexplained by either genes or shared family environment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Patricia K. Kuhl
Infants use statistical patterns in the speech they hear to tune their perception to their native language's sounds within the first year of life, narrowing from an initial ability to discriminate the sounds of any language.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Laurence Steinberg
Argues adolescent risk-taking results from a developmental gap between an early-maturing socioemotional system that responds strongly to reward and a still-immature cognitive control system, rather than from ignorance of the risks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. Stanley Hall
The founding text of adolescence as a distinct developmental period, arguing it is inherently a time of storm and stress driven by biological recapitulation - a claim later developmental research has substantially undermined.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026