Reviews the book, Conceptual Change in Childhood by Susan Carey (1985). In the course of development, children's ideas about living things change. In a series of studies of children 4 to 10 years of age, Carey attempts to document and describe these changes and the process through which they come about. Although Carey stresses that her account pertains only to the particular "domain" of
... [Show full abstract] biological knowledge, she is clearly concerned with the larger questions of what conceptual development is and how it ought to be studied. The central idea is that of restructuring. There can be restructuring in a stronger or weaker sense. Restructuring in the weaker sense occurs when the individual comes to conceive new relations among what Carey refers to as core concepts in the domain in question, where these concepts were previously understood either in isolation from one another or through a different set of connecting relations. The book analyzes an inherently interesting phenomenon in a lucid and novel way and has a clear argumentative structure. Carey is not alone in the portrayal of children's conceptual development as a series of focused, continuous changes of one state into other, more complex states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)