Culture and Cognitive Development: Giyoo Hatano’s Insights and the Questions They Open

To bring out Giyoo Hatano’s contributions to the understanding of culture and cognitive development, we note first his special style – thoughtful, inventive, and always focused on central issues and on combining theory with data – and then, for three areas, some of the conceptual advances he proposed. The areas have to do with ties between cognitive and social development (links between skills and identity provide the selected advance), the nature of expertise (adaptive expertise is the selected advance), and the place of what is ‘naturally given’ (selected is the emphasis on specifying what is biologically given, what is culturally ready-to-hand, and their interconnections). He will be missed both as a scholar and a person.