Disorder in the representational warehouse

Although developmental psychologists are generally happy to endorse dissociationist and gradualist views of development like Woolley's (2006), the design and interpretation of developmental research often suggests an implicit commitment to a cleaner, less dissociative, sudden-transition view of development. Such an implicit commitment may derive some of its power from the "representational warehouse" model of cognition and development that rose to prominence in the cognitive revolution. An alternative model of cognition and development, grounded in dispositional patterns of responding to stimuli, more naturally accommodates dissociative phenomena in development and highlights mechanisms for self-regulation and for fashioning and deploying representations, or depictions, in a uniquely human way.