This book presents the case for a new interdisciplinary field at the interface between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (from here on the book is referred to as DCN). From the perspective of developmental psychology, the neuroscience approach offers the opportunity of more biologically-based accounts of cognitive change during infancy and childhood. From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, a developmental approach offers the opportunity of examining the construction of an increasingly complex brain, and allows us to address such fundamental questions as the origins of cortical specificity of function.
One of the most fundamental questions in development concerns the interaction between genetic information (nature) and environmental information (nurture). While most agree that interaction between these sources of information is important, few have attempted to specify this interaction in detail, and behavioural studies with infants are still commonly used to support arguments for the importance of either nature or nurture. A key proposition of DCN is that a cognitive neuroscience approach can greatly enhance our thinking about the complex interaction between intrinsic structure and environmental information during human development. When information about cognitive and brain development is integrated, a picture of the infant as an active participant in its own postnatal brain development emerges.