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How he saw: Jerome Kagan's contexts of discovery
1Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Abstract:
Jerome Kagan was a psychologist and pioneer of developmental psychology, but he was intrigued by the natural sciences and read widely across history, biography, poetry, philosophy, cross-cultural anthropology, and the humanities. Drawing on unpublished archival and other primary source material, this essay describes two of Kagan's seminal studies in child development to demonstrate how their "contexts" facilitated scientific discovery and Kagan's own development as a researcher. A subset of Kagan's archival papers-including grant materials, correspondence, personal notes, and clipped articles-are also discussed to showcase the personal and scholastic material that Kagan read, wrote, and annotated, and which further advanced his scientific thinking. Collectively, these materials reveal the multiple contexts, both applied and private, in which Kagan "saw," thereby guiding his interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of child development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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