In recent years there has been an explosion of research into childhood cognitive development. Experiments with neonates (which must have involved some peculiar scenes in the maternity ward) have shown that even very young children, far from being the ‘tabulae rasa’ suggested by Locke, have strong and distinctive individual mental processes. This rapid growth in research can be well illustrated by comparing the two editions of The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (Goswami (2011), (2nd ed.), which I had the pleasure of reviewing for Reference Reviews (RR 2003/56 and RR 2011/154). In the eight years between them, there was an exponential growth in research – new chapters had to be inserted and most of the previous chapters rewritten. We have reviewed an engaging and idiosyncratic collection of essays on memory by Dudai (2002) (RR 2003/211) and an encyclopedia (Anderman 2009) aimed at the general American reader rather than the specialist (RR 2009/355), which are worth considering, and there are some recent textbooks such as The Development of Working Memory in Children (Henry 2012), which can be recommended. The study of memory in children, or at least the making of dogmatic statements about memory in children, has a long history – Hume, Darwin, Freud, Skinner, Piaget and Chomsky all made important and useful contributions, but the techniques for the scientific study of the topic have changed so much that books on it more than a few years old should be treated with caution.
The Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology (now, of course, Wiley-Blackwell) form an outstanding encyclopedic collection of research on child development. When reviewing the second edition of the Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, I suggested that future issues in the series should be published in two volumes, as they were getting so bulky as to be virtually unworkable. I am glad to see the printed version of this work, even if it is not listed as a component of the series, in two volumes each of which fits comfortably into the hand.
The book consists of 44 scholarly essays, averaging 20-30 pages in length, by 70 authors, virtually all of them professors at non-Ivy League American universities. The essays are arranged in seven broad sections: History, Theories and Methods; Mnemonic Processes; Mnemonic Contents; Autobiographical Memory; Emotion & Memory; Memory in Action and Longitudinal Studies. In practice, there is no sharp division, and they can be read as a seamless series. The essays are remarkably up-to-date. I noticed regular references to 2011 publications and very occasionally even to 2012 publications. I know from bitter experience how hard it is to get contributions in on time for a multi-authored work, and to ensure that the earliest entries are not out of date by the time the last recalcitrant contributor has been chivvied into action. The editors should be congratulated. I was also pleased to see occasional cross-references by contributors who had been given or had taken the opportunity to read each other’s work – too many multi-authored works are very obviously written by people who have not had the opportunity or the inclination to look at each other’s entries.
This book is very clearly aimed at specialist readers: psychologists or developmental scientists, particularly at a postgraduate level (though some individual chapters might be useful for undergraduate seminar reading), rather than at the general public or practitioners. There are lots of books on child development designed for general readers, and lots of books on child care and child psychology aimed at clinical, educational and legal practitioners. This book gives the research background to such publications rather than acting as a substitute for them. There are some important practical considerations which could be followed up from this, particularly in such matters as autobiographical memory: even very young children are clearly capable of remembering, yet for virtually all adults, it can be shown that their earliest real memories start when they are three to four years old. The extent to which memories can be fabricated has important forensic implications.
I was particularly glad to see the final section of this book, on longitudinal studies. Too much research has been based on cross-sectional studies, rather than considerations of which aspects of memory change over the course of time and which remain essentially constant. This is particularly important for clinicians etc. considering the long-term developmental problems of children who have been disordered or deprived in some way.
Inevitably, there are some omissions. I was disappointed not to find any mention of the effect of information technology (IT) on children’s memories, for example. This has been the subject of much anecdotal alarmism recently so I would have welcomed a review of such evidence as there is – perhaps next to chapter 39, on memory in the forensic context. As it is, IT is not even mentioned in the index.
Academic libraries catering for courses in psychology or child development should definitely consider this excellent handbook for acquisition, and should also be considering how much of their older stock on child psychology needs updating. Other libraries should seek out books more directly relevant to their needs, but their readers should be aware that this book summarises some of the research underlying such texts.
