Concepts About the Causes of Development: Travel, Visual Experience, and the Development of Dynamic Spatial Orientation

“Travel broadens the mind” is a good concept for developmental psychology. Travel is a metaphor for human experience as we explore the paths that life provides and theorize about the roles the paths play in development. The idea is one that I first learned about over dinner conversations as a child. The idea comes up over and over in literature and shaped many of us, reading Heyerdal’s (1948) The Kon Tiki Expedition and Steinbeck’s (1962) Travels With Charley in middle school, Dana’s (1840) Two Years Before the Mastand Darwin’s (1909) Voyage of the Beagle in high school, Henry James’s (1885) A Little Tour of Franceand Orwell’s (1933) Down and Out in Paris and Londonin college. For Campos et al. (this issue), travel is not a metaphor, but instead a summary label for the host of specific experiences that typically occur together with indeendent locomotion. Their article is about what we accept as explanation in psy chological development. They spell out some of the specific experiences that are associated with locomotion and point out processes by which these experiences might be linked together in a causal chain relating those specific experiences to development of depth perception, dynamic spatial orientation, emotion, and social relations. What makes this article important is the concept of psychological explanation that it provides. The rest of this article consists of two sections. The first is focused on