W. Mary Woodward: The Development of Behaviour

˝The newborn infant makes little contact through his own actions with the world he lives in. Yet from these few chance actions develop the complex skills with which adults act upon their environment - including the unobserved ˝internal˝ events that we call ˝thinking˝. This development is Dr Woodward's concern. ˝This is the gap,˝ writes the author, ˝that has to be filled by theories of human development: from reflexes and undirected movements to logical reasoning, values and creative imagination.... It is first necessary to identify the main forms of behaviour and of thinking that occur successively in development. These then serve as anchoring points for the study of change that leads to each new form.˝ Here is a detailed, precisely observed and argued introduction to the study of human development through the analysis and classification of complex behavioural sequences and mental processes. It draws principally upon the work of Piaget and Inhelder in Geneva; together with that of Bruner and other American psychologists who adopt a ˝process˝ approach to the problem of development behaviour.˝