addition to visual metacognition, including cognitive development, vision and folk psychology. Thisvolume would also be an excellent addition to a graduate seminar on visual metacognition, though itwas written on a level that may prove difficult for use in an undergraduate course.

TARA L. MITCHELLLock Haven University Pennsylvania, USA

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1157

Conducting research in the field of developmental science

HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH METHODS IN DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE. Douglas M.Teti(Ed.). Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004. No of pages xiii, 565. ISBN 0631222618. Price £85.00(hardback).

Whilst reading this book I have been marking sections and showing them to colleagues andstudents, which is always a sign of a useful book, especially the one titled a Handbook. However, Ifind it hard to recommend this book unreservedly, and one of my reservations is that some parts donot live up to the promise of the title. This is a pity, since much of it is eminently suitable forresearchers and students in the fields of either developmental psychology or research methods.

The book is divided into five sections—Design, Measurement, Intervention, Analysis and NewDirections. On the whole, the book starts and ends well, with some of the middle chapters letting itdown. Part I starts with two chapters both of which look at cross-sectional, longitudinal and relateddesigns. Although both are useful, they do cover some of the same material, and I found the secondchapter less appealing as it is more abstract with fewer helpful examples. Chapter 3 looks atmicrogenetic designs and is usefully descriptive and concrete, including a discussion of statisticalmethods, although possibly it might have benefited from some consideration of the impact onparticipants of such methods. Chapter 4 looks at ‘The Experimental Method’ and includes adiscussion of infant experimental techniques such as preferential looking. A more detailedconsideration of these, with greater emphasis on the pitfalls in paradigms, equipment andinterpretation, would have been very helpful as this chapter is quite uncritical of many debatablefindings using these techniques. In contrast, Chapter 5 contains a good discussion of the issues anddifficulties in relation to quasi-experimental designs.

Part II is probably the most heavily biased section towards socio-emotional development but has acouple of chapters that are more widely applicable (for example on individual difference constructsand parental versus professional data collection) and which discuss in detail the difficulties andissues in data collection in these areas. The other chapters in this section are quite general, andalthough some discussion is given of appropriate methods that have been used, they read more likereviews of the field than treatises on methods.

Part III, extremely interesting in terms of research methods, unfortunately is also quite weak andmainly deals with findings from studies using successful and unsuccessful intervention methods(although most of the authors seem to find it hard to distinguish the research methods fromintervention methods). Many of the chapters address some ethical issues, which seem crucial in thisarea, but again in general these are largely reviews of research with a few examples of good researchand recommendations for future research (and, in the case of NICU interventions in Chapter 15,recommendations on healthcare policy that are only applicable to the US).

Part IV seems to get back on track, and is a much better section overall, with helpful chapters forreference. Again, the bias towards socio-emotional development is evident but there are also someuseful examples relating to IQ research. Chapter 16, on the measurement of growth, is one of themost detailed reviews in the book outlining the basic and more complex methodological issues thatare associated with different stages of research, including the design stage. Discussion of these issuesis supported by the inclusion of good examples and practical help, for example on measurementequivalence issues, sampling issues and recruitment issues. Crucially the author suggests that there

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are huge problems with many of the studies that have been conducted in a wide range of areas withindevelopmental psychology.

Chapters 17 and 18 address similar issues and their order could usefully have been reversed; theyboth discuss latent growth curve analysis, but Chapter 18 by Wirtz is more concrete and accessiblethan Chapter 17 by McArdle, in which the discussion of structural equation modelling might well betoo abstract for those who are unfamiliar with this technique. Chapters 19 and 20, on dyadic researchand behavioural streams, respectively, are both practical and concrete, discussing useful ways toavoid pitfalls. Chapter 20 does concentrate very heavily on the authors’ own analysis programme.

Finally Part V on ‘New Directions’ discusses novel concepts (Chapters 21 & 22) and methods(Chapters 23–25). This section also has very little on aspects of development other than the socio-emotional development but, like the previous section, is well written and general enough to make upfor that on the whole. Chapter 21 is on emotional regulation and, in particular, concentrates on thetypes of measures that might be used in this area; Chapter 22, on person-environment ‘fit’ discussesmeasures also, but in a slightly different conceptual way—given that the characteristics of the personand the environment are not too hard to measure, how then can we obtain a useful measure of ‘fit’?This chapter, like some others, also highlights some badly-designed studies, which serve as a usefulwarning to other researchers.

The last three chapters discuss issues that have been around for a while but have recentlygenerated more interest and hence novel research methods, (infant memory in Chapter 23 andchildren’s reliability in recounting events in Chapter 24), and a variety of interesting new methods inChapter 25. Bauer addresses both the underlying conceptual challenge of whether studies of infantmemory are investigating the same object as those of older children and adults, and the methods thatcan be used for its investigation. Lamb and Thierry, in an interesting and helpful review, discuss theeminently practical and hyper-relevant issue of children’s testimony, examining the relevance andshortcomings of research using staged events or real events. In the final chapter, Bornstein et al.describe a few methodological advances: multi-level modelling as applied to foetal development(almost the only foray into an area outwith behaviour in this volume), event history analysis asapplied to language milestones, and item response theory, traditionally applied to educational testingbut here to the development of play in infancy.

My final niggle is the unrepresentative nature of the volume, both in terms of the fields ofdevelopmental science covered and in terms of the authorship. Of the 52 authors, four are fromEurope, three from Australia, while none are from the UK or Canada—all of the others are from theUS. The topics covered are almost entirely in the field of socio-emotional development—there isvery little coverage of cognitive development, one chapter only on language development, and giventhat the book is titled Developmental Science rather than Psychology it is extremely surprising thatthere is no material on any aspect of neural development. Reading this book, one would assume thatall the research on child development that is taking place currently is conducted in the US andconcerns socio-emotional development. Notable absences are corpus-based techniques, cross-cultural methods, electrophysiological methods, case and group studies in neuropsychology andneural network modelling; the absence of the last three only serve to emphasise the fields that aremissing from, and could well enhance, this book.

KATIE ALCOCKLancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1158

A fresh and interesting account of applied cognitive work

AN INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY. A. Esgate, D. Groome, K.Baker, D. Heathcote, R. Kemp, M. Maguire, & C. Reed. Psychology Press, Hove, 2005. No of pages327. ISBN 1-84169-318-9. Price £16.95 (paperback).

This book provides a long-overdue overview of the applications of cognitive psychologicalfindings. It is divided into 11 chapters, including a short introductory chapter. A wide range ofapplications of cognitive psychology is covered: memory improvement; everyday memory; face

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Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 19: 963–971 (2005)