IDENTIFIERS Chunking; Knowledge Acquisition; *Parallel Processes;

Cognitive development is driven by experience, but is mediated by domain general processes, which include learning, induction, and analogy. The concepts children understand, and the strategies they develop based on that understanding, depend on the complexity of the representation they can construct. Conceptual complexity can be defined in terms of the number of independent dimensions that need to be represented. Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models of the way in which information is represented help to explain why the number of dimensions that can be processed in parallel is limited. This explanation leads to a new definition of processing capacity, which seems to account for many phenomena, including some that have traditionally been attributed to stages. The definition implies that cognitive development is an interaction of domain specific and domain general processes. An overarching goal of research is to define the nature of this interaction. An important result of the interaction is the growth in the capacity to represent concepts of increasing structural complexity. This capacity to represent information controls the concepts that are acquired as a function of experience. (MM) * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document.