Building Bridges: Cognitive Development in Typical and Atypical Development

How can the study of typical development inform our understanding of atypical development? How can the study of atypical development inform our understanding of typical development? This book addresses these questions in the context of cognitive development?a discipline that focuses on the changes and continuity that characterize the intellectual processes that support mental life. The contributions range from a consideration of what autism teaches us about the development of attention, to how the study of multiracial and gender-nonconforming children enriches and challenges traditional approaches to understanding social perception. This book demonstrates how two fields of study that too often operate independently can benefit from each other theoretically, empirically, and practically. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cognition and Development.

Introduction – Building Bridges: Cognitive Development in Typical and Atypical Populations1. How I Attend—Not How Well Do I Attend: Rethinking Developmental Frameworks of Attention and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development2. Considering Development in Developmental Disorders3. Why We Should Study the Broader Autism Phenotype in Typically Developing Populations4. Reading Development in Typically Developing Children and Children With Prenatal or Perinatal Brain Lesions: Differential School Year and Summer Growth5. Constraints on Multiple Object Tracking in Williams Syndrome: How Atypical Development Can Inform Theories of Visual Processing6. Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial, Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental ScienceCommentaries 7. Bridge Building and Other Possible Metaphors for Patching Over Discrepancies Between Typical and Atypical Development8. Bridging the Gaps in the Study of Typical and Atypical Cognitive Development: A Commentary

Vikram Jaswal is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, USA.

Nameera Akhtar is Professor of Psychology at University of California-Santa Cruz, USA.

Jacob A. Burack is Professor of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University, Canada.