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AbstractThis paper aims to compare cognitive development in humans and chimpanzees to illuminate the evolutionary origins of human cognition. Comparison of morphological data and life history strongly highlights the common features of all primate species, including humans. The human mother–infant relationship is characterized by the physical separation of mother and infant, and the stable supine posture of infants, that enables vocal exchange, face‐to‐face communication, and manual gestures. The cognitive development of chimpanzees was studied using the participation observation method. It revealed that humans and chimpanzees show similar development until 3 months of age. However, chimpanzees have a unique type of social learning that lacks the social reference observed in human children. Moreover, chimpanzees have unique immediate short‐term memory capabilities. Taken together, this paper presents a plausible evolutionary scenario for the uniquely human characteristics of cognition.

"Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts investigates the impact of screen media on key aspects of children and adolescents' cognitive development. Highlighting how screen media impact cognitive development, the book addresses a topic often neglected amid societal concerns about pathological media use and vulnerability to media effects, such as aggression, cyber-bullying and Internet addiction. It addresses children and adolescents' cognitive development involving their interactions with parents, early language development, imaginary play, attention, memory, and executive control, literacy and academic performance."--Provided by publisher

A constructivist theory of the evolution of cognitive development is proposed. Seven propositions are posed plus supporting evidence. Constructing fundamental physical and logicomathematical conceptual universals underlies the development of cognition in primate phylogeny, ontogeny and history. Nevertheless, diverging onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing and organization mark the evolution of cognitive development in primate phylogeny. Thus, the evolution is heterochronic, not simply recapitulatory. Converging origins followed by diverging development of primates' conceptual constructions insures species‐specific cognitive specializations. Some specializations (e.g. recursive classifying) evolved in great ape development but not in monkey development; while others (e.g. hierarchically integrated classifying) evolved in human development only. Human enculturation and language (symbolic) rearing fosters quantitative but not qualitative progress in most of chimpanzees' developing cognition. Heterochronic evolution provided humans with the widest and most synchronic ontogenetic window of opportunity for progressive cognitive development. The descendant cognitive development – humans' precocial, integrated and extended intellectual constructions – bridges the evolution and history of ideas.

The objective of this study was to determine whether several key concepts related to child development could be extended to existing theory and research concerning the comprehension of television by kindergartners and early primary school children. Much of the current research in the effects tradition has concentrated on the role of television in eliciting aggressive behavior. A neglected area is the function of television as a teacher of such things as appropriate social behavior, the ways by which characters resolve problems and the motives of individuals. During a one-year period several groups of young children were observed to determine how information from television programs was incorporated into their play, and to what extent developmental predictors such as role-taking, narrative recall, and liking for programs mediated the process of learning. For a more rigorous investigation, ninety children of three grade levels were given several cognitive developmental tasks to assess the specific instances of problem resolutions and motive content extracted from a popular television program. Results indicate that role-taking and program-liking are significant predictors of program comprehension, but narrative recall is not. Overall analysis of results suggests that individual differences among children partially explain the amount and kind of social learning from the medium, while chronological age is the most accurate index of content-learning.