What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? The processes that occur along the way are so complex that any attempt to understand development necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging. This book is the first volume in a two-volume publication that presents an integrative new framework for considering development. The chapters give reviews of up-to-to date findings from neurobiology, brain imaging, child development, and computer and robotic modelling to consider why children's thinking develops the way it does. They propose a new synthesis of development that is based on five key principles found to operate at many levels of descriptions. These principles explain what causes a number of key developmental phenomena, including infants' interaction with objects, early social cognitive interactions, and the causes of dyslexia. The ‘neuroconstructivist’ framework also shows how developmental disorders arise from developmental processes that operate under atypical constraints. How these principles work is illustrated in several case studies ranging from perceptual to social and reading development. Finally, the book uses neuroimaging, behavioural analyses, computational simulations and robotic models to provide a way of understanding the mechanisms and processes that cause development to occur.

Human adults can go beyond the limits of individual sensory systems’ resolutions by integrating multiple estimates (e.g., vision and touch) to reduce uncertainty. Little is known about how this ability develops. Although some multisensory abilities are present from early infancy, it is not until age ≥8 y that children use multiple modalities to reduce sensory uncertainty. Here we show that uncertainty reduction by sensory integration does not emerge until 12 y even within the single modality of vision, in judgments of surface slant based on stereoscopic and texture information. However, adults’ integration of sensory information comes at a cost of losing access to the individual estimates that feed into the integrated percept (“sensory fusion”). By contrast, 6-y-olds do not experience fusion, but are able to keep stereo and texture information separate. This ability enables them to outperform adults when discriminating stimuli in which these information sources conflict. Further, unlike adults, 6-y-olds show speed gains consistent with following the fastest-available single cue. Therefore, whereas the mature visual system is optimized for reducing sensory uncertainty, the developing visual system may be optimized for speed and for detecting sensory conflicts. Such conflicts could provide the error signals needed to learn the relationships between sensory information sources and to recalibrate them while the body is growing.

From at least two months onwards, infants can form perceptual categories. During the first year of life, object knowledge develops from the ability to represent individual object features to representing correlations between attributes and to integrate information from different sources. At the end of the first year, these representations are shaped by labels, opening the way to conceptual knowledge. Here, we review the development of object knowledge and object categorization over the first year of life. We then present an artificial neural network model that models the transition from early perceptual categorization to categories mediated by labels. The model informs a current debate on the role of labels in object categorization by suggesting that although labels do not act as object features they nevertheless affect perceived similarity of perceptually distinct objects sharing the same label. The model presents the first step of an integrated account from early perceptual categorization to language-based concept learning.

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognitionproposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach iscontext dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization. We suggest that the main outcome of development is partial representations, distributed across distinct functional circuits. This framework is derived by examining development at the level of single neurons, brain systems, and whole organisms. We use the termsencellment,embrainment, andembodimentto describe the higher-level contextual influences that act at each of these levels of organization. To illustrate these mechanisms in operation we provide case studies in early visual perception, infant habituation, phonological development, and object representations in infancy. Three further case studies are concerned with interactions between levels of explanation: social development, atypical development and within that, developmental dyslexia. We conclude that cognitive development arises from a dynamic, contextual change in embodied neural structures leading to partial representations across multiple brain regions and timescales, in response to proactively specified physical and social environment.