The foundations of mind: Origins of conceptual thought.

"The Foundations of Mind presents a new theory of cognitive development in infancy, focusing on the ways that perceptual information becomes transformed into conceptual thought. Mandler tackles issues such as how babies form concepts and begin to think before they have language, and how they can recall the past and make inductive inferences. Drawing on her extensive research, she illustrates how these processes form the conceptual basis for language and advanced thought, stressing the importance of distinguishing automatic perceptual processes from conceptualizations about what is perceived. She argues that these two kinds of learning, though sometimes confounded in psychological experimentation, follow…