The role of mental representation in social development

Since the 1950s one of the most important advances has been the introduction of mental representation as a means of understanding development. Across all areas of developmental psychology, starting in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, came the idea that children's mental representations and concepts-number concepts, object concepts, representations of grammatical rules, self-conceptions, attachment/ relationship conceptions, causal conceptions, and the like- could give us unique insights into how experience is registered and how it goes on to shape the child's subsequent interactions with the physical and social world.