CHAPTER 1 Neural Bases of Cognitive Development

The goal of this chapter is to review what is known about the neural bases of cognitive development. We begin by discussing why developmental psychologists might be interested in the neural bases of behavior (with particular reference to cognitive development). Having established the value of viewing child development through the lens of the developmental neurosciences, we provide an overview of brain development. This is followed by a The writing of this chapter was made possible, in part, by grants from the NIH to the first author (NS34458, NS329976), and from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (through their funding of a research network on Early Experience and Brain Development) and to the second author from the NIMH (MH02024). The first author wishes to thank Lisa Benz for assistance in literature reviews, Eric Knudsen for sharing his insights into neural plasticity, and members of the Laboratory of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. discussion of how experience influences the develop-ing—and when appropriate, developed—brain. Within this discussion on experience-dependent changes in brain development, we briefly touch on two issues we consider to be essential for all developmental psychologists: whether the mechanisms that underlie developmental plasticity differ from those that underlie adult plasticity, and more fundamentally, what distinguishes plasticity from development. With this basic neuroscience background behind us, we turn our attention to specific content areas, limiting ourselves to domains in which there is a corpus of knowledge about the neural underpinnings of cognitive development. We discuss learning and memory, face/object recognition, attention /executive functions, and spatial cognition, including illustrative examples from both typical and atypical development. We conclude the chapter 4 Neural Bases of Cognitive Development with a discussion of the future of developmental cogni-tive neuroscience. Prior to the ascendancy of Piagetian theory, the field of cognitive development, such as it was, was dominated by behaviorism (for discussion, see Goldman-Rakic, 1987; Nelson & Bloom, 1997). As students of the history of psychology are well aware, behaviorism eschewed the nonobservable; therefore, the study of the neural bases of behavior was not pursued for the simple reason that neural processes could not be observed. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Piagetian theory gradually came to replace behaviorism as the dominant theory of cognitive development. Despite being a biologist by training, Piaget and, subsequently, his followers primarily concerned themselves with developing a richly detailed cognitive architecture of the mind— albeit a brainless mind. We do not mean …