Developmental cognitive neuroscience

Origins of the discipline

The origin of the discipline of developmental cognitive neuroscience can be traced back to conference held in Philadelphia in 1989 co-funded by NICHD & NIMH, organized by Adele Diamond, that started the process of developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists talking with one another. To bridge the communication gaps, researchers were invited from different fields who were either using the same experimental paradigms to study the same behaviors or were investigating related scientific questions in complementary ways—though they were unaware of one another’s work. They used different words to talk about their work and had different ways of thinking about it, but the concrete, observable behaviors, and the precise experimental conditions under which those behaviors occurred, served to make translation possible. Participants were a small Who’s Who of leaders in developmental science, behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive science. Several new cross-disciplinary collaborations resulted from it, and it is a testament to the value of what came out of the meeting that Oxford University Press tried to acquire the rights to re-issue the book of the meeting’s proceedings 10 years later—The Development and Neural Basis of Higher Cognitive Functions. (The original printing sold out faster than any other New York Academy of Science Annals issue has before or since.)

Developmental psychologists and neuroscientists used to know little of one another’s work. There was so little communication between those fields that for 50 years scientists in both fields were using essentially the same behavioral assay but they did not know it. (Developmental psychologists called the measure the A-not-B task but neuroscientists called it the delayed response task.) In the early 1980s, Diamond not only showed these two tasks showed the identical developmental progression and rely on the same region of prefrontal cortex but through a systematic series of studies in human infants, and infant and adult monkeys with and without lesions to different brain regions. That work was absolutely pivotal in launching the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience because it established the very first strong link between early cognitive development and the functions of a specific brain region. That gave encouragement to others that rigorous experimental work addressing brain-behavior relations was possible in infants. It also fundamentally altered the scientific understanding of prefrontal cortex early in development; clearly it was not silent as accepted wisdom had held.

Mark Johnson's 1997 text Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience was seminal in coining the field's name.

Tools and techniques employed

Absolutely critical to being able to understand brain function in children have been neuroimaging techniques, first EEG & ERPs, then fMRI, and more recently NIRS, MEG, & TMS that look at function and MRI, DTI, & MRS that look at structure, connectivity, and metabolism. Before functional neuroimaging techniques scientists were constrained to trying to understand function from dysfunction (i.e., trying to understand how the brain works from seeing what deficits occur when the brain is damaged or impaired). It is difficult to understate how important technological advances have been to the emerging field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

Ground-breaking pioneers

Early trailblazers

Younger leaders