Conceptual Development in Early Childhood

The study of conceptual development in early childhood seeks to understand how infants and young children learn to filter, organize, and store disparate pieces of information, experiences, and observations about people, objects, and actions into efficient categories and coherent conceptual systems. A central part of human cognition, conceptual development is an open-ended, complex, and dynamic process that continues across the life span. Although a field of study that typically is the focus of developmental and cognitive psychologists, what we know today about young children’s conceptual development comes from scholars from a range of disciplines and research that has used a multiplicity of methodological approaches and tools. This is evident in the many edited collections that exist on the topic, which also serve as a testament to the recognition that understanding how young minds work needs a continuing dialogue between different but strongly interrelated areas of young children’s cognitive development (e.g., language development and conceptual development). Conceptual development in early childhood is also an area of study rich with competing theories and ongoing debates, a fact that also has positive implications: controversies have led to more comprehensive views and theories of conceptual development in early childhood. One finding that seems to cut across more than fifty years of research on the topic shows the dramatic shifts in conceptual development in the first three years of life and the sophistication of infants’ and very young children’s conceptual abilities. Motivated to explore the world around them, children show, from a very early age, rich conceptual understandings in a variety of domains. This finding has important implications not only for the study of human cognition—understanding infants’ conceptual development provides important insights into the human mind in general—but also for the fields of education and instruction, which are interested in conceptual change and concept-based teaching. This review is organized by headings that correspond to core issues and key research areas in the field. The selected resources constitute only a sample of what has been published and is being published every year on early conceptual development. They include seminal works that have framed important debates in the field, influential publications that provide insights into how the field has developed, resources that seek to demonstrate the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to understanding conceptual development, and recent texts that show the questions that researchers keep asking.