This multidisciplinary volume features many of the world's leading experts of infant development, who synthesize their research on infant learning and behaviour, while integrating perspectives across neuroscience, socio-cultural context, and policy. It offers an unparalleled overview of infant development across foundational areas such as prenatal development, brain development, epigenetics, physical growth, nutrition, cognition, language, attachment, and risk. The chapters present theoretical and empirical depth and rigor across specific domains of development, while highlighting reciprocal connections among brain, behavior, and social-cultural context. The handbook simultaneously educates, enriches, and encourages. It educates through detailed reviews of innovative methods and empirical foundations and enriches by considering the contexts of brain, culture, and policy. This cutting-edge volume establishes an agenda for future research and policy, and highlights research findings and application for advanced students, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers with interests in understanding and promoting infant development.

‘This Handbook provides a remarkably comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of infant development. In my view, it fully succeeds in educating and enriching readers and encouraging them to move beyond simplistic nature versus nurture questions and to see infant development as being both embodied and also embedded within a culture.'

Mark Johnson - Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge

‘This book brings together essays that reach across many rich and varied disciplines to capture infancy research today. Perhaps most impressive, this well-curated volume is more than a summary - it presents a foundation for strengthening cross-disciplinary research to support positive developmental outcomes for all infants.’

Sandra R. Waxman - Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University

‘The editors offer researchers, policymakers, and practitioners theoretically rigorous and empirically innovative chapters on infancy and human development from the best minds in the field, spanning disciplines and perspectives from across the world. The result is a cutting-edge guide to the research and theory on the subject.’

Natasha Cabrera - Professor of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland

‘Written and edited by the foremost experts in the world on early human development, this is a comprehensive compilation focused on all aspects of infant development. It is sure to be a valuable resource for years to come for scientists, policymakers, and practitioners.’

Kimberly Noble - Professor of Neuroscience and Education, Columbia University

‘This is an outstanding volume on development across infancy and the wide-ranging mechanisms associated with patterns of developmental change. Each section contains the scaffolding for numerous specialized courses on early development. The quality of the Handbook means that it will influence programs of research across the globe.’

Martha Ann Bell - Professor of Psychology, Virginia Tech