Understanding Delay in Developmental Disorders

Understanding Delay in Developmental Disorders

Researchers in developmental disorders frequently refer to abilities that are in line with mental age as simply delayed. The qualifier simply might imply an existing theory of developmental delay that is well understood and uninteresting (perhaps because it is an exaggerated form of individual differences, the responsibility of other researchers). In this article, I argue that the notion of del...

Understanding and Evaluating Learning and Developmental Disorders in Children

Emotion Understanding in Developmental Disorders What Can Neuroscience Teach Us?

Empathy is thought to play a key role in motivating helping behavior and providing the affective basis for moral development. Neuroimaging studies clearly document that watching someone in pain elicits a negative arousal response in the observer to a stronger degree in children than in young adults. Findings indicate that although children and adults have similar patterns of brain response to p...

Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders.

It is a truism that development involves contributions from both genes and environment, but theories differ with respect to the roles they attribute to each, which deeply affects the ways in which developmental disorders are researched. The strict nativist approach to abnormal phenotypes, inspired by adult neuropsychology and evolutionary psychology, seeks to identify impairments to domain-spec...

How neuropsychology informs our understanding of developmental disorders.

This review includes 1) an explanation of what neuropsychology is, 2) a brief history of how developmental cognitive neuroscience emerged from earlier neuropsychological approaches to understanding atypical development, 3) three recent examples that illustrate the benefits of this approach, 4) issues and challenges this approach must face, and 5) a forecast for the future of this approach.