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New conceptions of learning, analogy, and capacity have fundamentally changed scientists' view of cognitive development. New conceptions of learning help to explain how representations of the world are acquired. New models of analogical reasoning have suggested that logical inferences are often made by mapping a problem into a mental model, or schema, induced from ordinary life experience. A model of analogical reasoning provides a basis for understanding children's limitations in cognitive capacity, and specifies changes in the nature of children's cognitive representations over time that explain phenomena previously attributed to developmental stages. The concepts children understand, and the strategies they develop based on their understanding, depend on the complexity of the representations they construct. Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP), a model of cognitive processing, explains why the number of dimensions, or independent items of information required to represent a concept, that can be processed in parallel is limited. The PDP model provides an account of the effect of the complexity of a concept on children's cognitive performance. In this model, cognitive growth depends on four main factors: (1) learning and induction; (2) conceptual chunking; (3) serial processing strategies; and (4) the development of the ability to represent concepts of higher dimensionality. A list of 39 references is attached. (MM)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert