Children’s Discovery of the Active Mind

Bradford Pillow, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at Northern Illinois University. Since receiving his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1986, he has conducted research on the development of metacognition and social cognition in preschool children, elementary school children, and adolescents. His research focuses primarily on children’s ability to infer another person’s knowledge, beliefs, or visual experience,  children’s understanding of cognitive processes such as attention, inference, comprehension, and memory, children’s ability to monitor their own cognitive states, and children’s explanations of another person’s behavior.  Currently, he is Associate Editor for The Journal of Genetic Psychology, and Consulting Editor for Child Development.

• Chapter 1. Learning About Cognitive Activities.- Chapter 2. Conceptual Knowledge About Cognitive Activities.- Chapter 3. Phenomenological Awareness: Consciousness and the Development of Cognitive Monitoring.- Chapter 4. Social Experience as a Source of Information about Mental Events.- Chapter 5. Patterns of Influence Among Phenomenological Awareness, Social Experience, and Conceptual Knowledge.- Chapter 6. Conclusion.

From the reviews: "The question of how and when children come to understand their own mental activities and those of others (theory of mind) has generated a large body of research over the last several decades. In Children's Discovery of the Active Mind ... Bradford Pillow seeks to summarize, organize, and conceptualize these voluminous investigations. ... Pillow uses the book to put forth his own model of the development of children's knowledge of cognitive activities. ... Pillow obviously wrote for those researching theory of mind." (David Elkind, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 57 (45), November, 2012)