Building Bridges

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 Populations 1. How I Attend-Not How Well Do I Attend: Rethinking Developmental Frameworks of Attention and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development 2. Considering Development in Developmental Disorders 3. Why We Should Study the Broader Autism Phenotype in Typically Developing Populations 4. Reading Development in Typically Developing Children and Children With Prenatal or Perinatal Brain Lesions: Differential School Year and Summer Growth 5. Constraints on Multiple Object Tracking in Williams Syndrome: How Atypical Development Can Inform Theories of Visual Processing 6. Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial, Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental Science Commentaries 7. Bridge Building and Other Possible Metaphors for Patching Over Discrepancies Between Typical and Atypical Development 8. Bridging the Gaps in the Study of Typical and Atypical Cognitive Development: A Commentary