An outline of the role of brain in human cognitive development.

Brain development in humans occurs stagewise in correlation with the onsets of the main Piagetian stages of reasoning development. This allows a description of cognitive development as at least partially resulting from and dependent upon biological events occurring in the brain. Evidence shows that some eventual brain structures depend on a combination of biological events and instructional inputs. This contributes to the instruction dependence of the higher cognitive functions. Such a description thereby permits some novel working hypotheses about normal cognitive development and how to foster it as well as suggests alternative ways of creating intervention programs for children from deprived environments. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.