The Rise of Developmental Psychology

Reviews the book, Cognitive Development in Children: Five Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development by No Author (1970). This book is a collection of the reports of five conferences organized by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Intellective Processes Research (University of Minnesota), which sponsored the Cognitive Institute at the beginning of the 1960s. The conference reports were landmarks when they came out, breathing life into child psychology and turning it in new directions. It is surprising how much the length and breadth of contemporary developmental psychology seemed to emerge in the five conferences that took place between April 1960 and May 1962. What happened seemed something like progress the hermit crab's way. If science is to be a cooperative enterprise in which hundreds of scattered individuals combine their efforts, there must be mechanisms to unify their work. For a time at least, these five conferences were a landmark in the collective memory of the community of developmental psychologists-helping members to maintain a stable vision of methods, goals, purposes, and values that all shared. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)