Human Behavior and the Developing Brain

This book contains black-and-white illustrations.

Over the past few decades, innovative, noninvasive techniques for studying the activity of the brain have provided new insights into brain-behavior relations. Now, developmental scientists are using these techniques with young infants

Warren D. Rosen

This book presents current knowledge on developmental neuropsychology. The contributors provide historical perspectives, current data, and theoretical inference regarding normal brain development, the development of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capabilities, and their interrelationships. The purpose is to present in one volume current theory and research regarding the neurological mediation of psychological development that accounts for continuous and discontinuous progression, addressing normative development and individual differences. The field of developmental neuropsychology has had a need for just such a book. Allowing for constraints caused by technological limitations in neurological assessment and the infancy of such research, the selected chapters admirably represent the state of the field. This book is designed for developmental psychology graduate students, who may well need significant background in neuroscience to make best use of the readings. The authors present a well-integrated and insightful overview of the book in the preface, and the contributors are central voices in their respective areas. The book makes excellent use of graphs and neuroimaging illustrations, with clarifying descriptions. The references are suitably representative of seminal works up to currently obtained data in press. The structural features of the book are comfortably functional. In the field of child neuropsychology, which has long emphasized adult models and pathology in development, this volume could not be more timely. In emphasizing both cognitive and emotional development, it is as important to the clinical child neuropsychologist as to the developmental neuroscientist. This bookcould easily be the backbone of a superb upper-level graduate course.

Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, is editor of Autism: Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Internationally recognized for her scientific research on autism and developmental psychopathology, particularly the effects of early experience on development, she earned her doctorate in developmental and child clinical psychology at the University of Washington, and received postdoctoral training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Kurt W. Fischer, Ph.D., is Professor of Education in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University, where he is leading an initiative to focus on diversity in development and its implications for education. During 1992-1993, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he organized a group on Dynamic Modeling of Growth and Development.