Developmental Cascades: Building the Infant Mind

Children take their first steps, speak their first words, and learn to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects previous developments in the child across a range of domains, and each change provides opportunities for future development. Developmental Cascades proposes a new framework for understanding development by arguing that change can be explained in terms of the events that occur at one point in development, which set the stage or cause a ripple effect for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behavior at another point in time. It is argued that these developmental cascades are influenced by different kinds of constraints that do not have a single foundation: they may originate from the structure of the child’s nervous system and body, the physical or social environment, or knowledge and experience. These constraints occur at multiple levels of processing, change over time, and both contribute to developmental cascades and are their product. Oakes and Rakison present an overview of this developmental cascade perspective as a general framework for understanding change throughout a lifespan, although it is applied primarily to cognitive development in infancy. Issues on how a cascade approach obviates the dichotomy between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms and the origins of constraints are addressed. The framework is illustrated utilizing a wide range of domains (e.g., attachment, gender, motor development), and is examined in detail through application to three domains within infant cognitive development (looking behavior, object representations, and concepts for animacy).