Editing Developmental psychology (section)

===Cognitive development===
{{Main|Cognitive development|Theory of cognitive development|Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development}}
Cognitive development is primarily concerned with how infants and children acquire, develop, and use internal mental capabilities such as: problem-solving, memory, and language. Major topics in cognitive development are the study of language acquisition and the development of perceptual and motor skills. Piaget was one of the influential early psychologists to study the development of cognitive abilities. His theory suggests that development proceeds through a set of stages from infancy to adulthood and that there is an end point or goal.

Other accounts, such as that of [[Lev Vygotsky]], have suggested that development does not progress through stages, but rather that the developmental process that begins at birth and continues until death is too complex for such structure and finality. Rather, from this viewpoint, developmental processes proceed more continuously. Thus, development should be analyzed, instead of treated as a product to obtain.

[[K. Warner Schaie]] has expanded the study of cognitive development into adulthood. Rather than being stable from adolescence, Schaie sees adults as progressing in the application of their cognitive abilities.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Schaie KW | date = 1990 | chapter = Intellectual development in adulthood. | veditors = Birren JE, Schaie KW | title = Handbook of the psychology of aging | edition = 3rd | pages = 291–309 | location = New York | publisher = Academic Press }}</ref>

Modern cognitive development has integrated the considerations of [[cognitive psychology]] and the psychology of [[individual differences]] into the interpretation and modeling of development.<ref name="demetriou">{{cite book | vauthors = Demetriou A | date = 1998 | chapter = Cognitive development. | veditors = Demetriou A, Doise W, van Lieshout KF | title = Life-span developmental psychology | pages = 179–269 | location = London | publisher =  Wiley }}</ref> Specifically, [[the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development]] showed that the successive levels or stages of cognitive development are associated with increasing processing efficiency and [[working memory]] capacity. These increases explain differences between stages, progression to higher stages, and individual differences of children who are the same-age and of the same grade-level. However, other theories have moved away from Piagetian stage theories, and are influenced by accounts of [[domain-specific]] information processing, which posit that development is guided by innate evolutionarily-specified and content-specific information processing mechanisms.