Developmental psychology is a vibrant and rapidly growing field of psychology that seems, with each passing year, to become more and more exciting, compre-hensive, and ultimately, more challenging. And this excitement, this challenge, is not something that is only felt by developmental psychologists themselves! The findings of developmental psychology continue to fascinate the media, to inform educators and assist in the creation of sound educational policy, to aid in the development of government policy that is designed to maximize population health and wellbeing, and to aid parents in their attempts to better understand, raise, and interact with their own children. Students of developmental psychol-ogy today will find themselves faced with a growing body of information, most of which they can never hope to truly master due to the ever widening scope of the field. In large part, this is because of the nature of the study of developmen tal psychology as a field of scientific inquiry. As David Buss (1995) has pointed out, developmental psychology can be thought of as an approach that one takes to some field within psychology. That is, a developmental psychologist is fun-damentally interested in understanding change across the lifespan in some domain of development such as thinking and reasoning, emotion, personality, social understanding, or language. As a consequence, most developmental psy-chologists end up specializing within a given area of development after their undergraduate and postgraduate training. This specialization reduces the bur den somewhat, but it is still the case that many developmental psychologists feel evelopmen a strong need to keep abreast of theoretical and methodological innovations in the field as a whole in addition to their own areas of specialization, especially as an awareness of these innovations tends, in many cases, to lead to important developments within a given domain of inquiry.