Abstract
The next several pages are intended as a Commentary on the six target articles bundled together as a Special Issue of the Journal of Cognition and Development — literature reviews and research reports all intended to “build bridges” between the study of cognitive development in typical and atypical populations.
AN AGENDA
Following a few expressions of regrets (one should probably never agree to review a review, let alone six such interlaced accounts), an attempt will be made to provide a quick thumbnail summary of each of these six target articles. Given that these various contributions are about autism (three articles), Williams Syndrome (WS), brain lesions, and other variable forms of atypicality, there is little hope of rooting out common contents across these multiple manuscripts. Together, these dozen or more authors cite in excess of 500 references, few if any of which are mere elaborations but instead point readers off in even more diverse directions.
What does bind these six manuscripts together is some shared conviction that bridges can and should be built between the well and the unwell, between the typical and atypical forms of development, and between all and sundry dichotomies that artificially divide what all contributors to this volume casually refer to (often too casually) as traditional and nontraditional forms of development.
One of the dangers brought on by such a shared commitment to the prospect of building bridges between typical and atypical developmental forms is that it serves to reinforce the same potentially false dichotomy that it is sworn to overcome. That is, outside the inner circle of those committed to the developmental study of childhood psychopathology, one would be hard pressed to find anyone who writes about typical development (or TD) as though it were some fixed standard against which any deviancy could be measured. None of the articles that make up this compendium show any such reluctance but go on instead to imagine that TD is some rock-solid benchmark against which atypicality can be judged.
It is also a matter of concern that the sorts of atypicality featured in evidence are all problems of a sort that are routinely believed to be owed to genetic, biological, and trauma-related crises. Certainly, these assaults are real enough, but they account for only a modest fraction of the sum total of ways that development can “go wrong.” Almost certainly, a more fulsome portrait of the multiple ways that development can come undone will need to consider assaults that do not reach down to the level of genes or central nervous system tissues and so make a more serious place for environmental, social, and cultural factors.
Finally, a brief account, which aims to locate the contest between typical and atypical development within the context of dichotomies more generally, will end this short commentary. The case to be made here will be that the metaphors of bridge building presuppose the substantive or ontological legitimacy of the anchor points (i.e., deviant development and TD), whereas more promising attempts to escape such potentially false dichotomies need to begin by challenging what is better seen as an artificial divide.
As Nietzsche (1880/Citation1988) argued,
the general imprecise way of observing everywhere in nature opposites … where there are not opposites but differences in degree is a bad habit that is responsible for an unspeakable amount of pain, arrogance, harshness, estrangement [and] frigidity … because we think we see opposites instead of transitions. (cited in Gjerde & Onishi, Citation2000)
This commentary will end with a further elaboration of still other demerits of such bad habits.
THUMBNAIL DESCRIPTIONS
Article 1: ‘How I Attend—Not How Well Do I Attend’
The springboard article by Burack and colleagues is intended to better alert the community of autism researchers to the importance of refocusing their own attention away from disabilities per se and to consider instead the distinctive styles or ways in which youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) solve attentional problems. The upshot of this tightly reasoned work is that attention, both among persons with ASD and those manifesting so-called TD, might best be recast in terms of the questions of how rather than how well. The broad argument is that by focusing attention on the how question, contemporary research offers examples of more transactional and dynamic systems and ties together the full sweep of the developmental process.
Article 2: ‘Considering Development in Developmental Disorders’
Paterson and colleagues take up a theme already familiar from the work of Burack et al. (this issue)—that, on the whole, the research literature on autistic youth tends to promote an understanding of this disorder that is not necessarily longitudinal. Rather, by also following the siblings of children with autism, this account (for the first time) promotes a developmental approach to the study of brain imaging data that demonstrates that ASD is best understood as a set of individual trajectories that, at various developmental junctures, are not properly embedded in real-world contexts.
These authors guide their inquiry by focusing on “six central lenses for studying disorders of development”—lenses that include dimensional approaches to processes (rather than only products) and that, through the use of multiple methods, emphasize both developmental timing and individual differences, as well as a continuum of performance.
Although this multiple-everything approach leaves few stones unturned, it nevertheless creates huge funding challenges and research management difficulties—different diagnostic groups are measured at distinctive developmental moments, using a range of measurement tools and a variety of observers. The resources needed to support such an enterprise are considerable and need to be backed up by the serious payoff of outcomes. It remains unclear whether such outcomes are in sight.
Article 3: ‘Why We Should Study the Broader Autism Phenotype in Typically Developing Populations’
Continuing the search for better bridges between our understanding of autism and various subclinical variations of the broader autism phenotype (BAP), Landry and Chouinard have worked to identify limitations in existing BAP models, to improve upon these earlier measures, and to specify their relevance to cognitive development in general. Most particularly, BAP measures are argued to characterize the cognitive profile of persons with ASD at the extreme—an essential notion in developmental psychopathology. With success, the predominant role of genetic rather than parental or environmental participation in the causal course of psychopathology will, according to these authors, presumably be made evident.
Article 4: ‘Reading Development in Typically Developing Children and Children With Prenatal or Perinatal Brain Lesions’
Demir-Lira and Levine approach the problem of better understanding the role of structured environmental support in the reading skills of children with prenatal or perinatal brain lesions by comparing their respective summer slides (i.e., the amount that students regress during the summer in their previous learning gains). Their findings, which are presented more as a typical standalone research report than other contributions to this issue, not only showed that children with biological challenges vary in their growth patterns, but that the same was also true of their response to various environmental challenges. Overall, by including both biological and environmental factors in their efforts to account for the developmental trajectories of both typically developing and atypically developing children, the efforts of these authors hold out real promise in fostering a true dialogue between those who study development at its best and worst.
Article 5: ‘Constraints on Multiple-Object Tracking: How Atypical Development Can Inform Theories of Visual Processing’
Ferrara, Hoffman, O’Hearn, and Landau report two experiments in which the eye-tracking performance of individuals with WS was compared to the performance of other normally developing persons on tasks that involved moving targets as they either temporarily disappeared behind an occluder or imploded (seemed to temporarily shrink out of sight). The proposed difference between these two conditions is that occluded objects are seen to follow the ordinary principles of object persistence in ways that imploded objects do not.
Although members of the WS sample consistently demonstrated reduced general tracking capacity, like their traditionally developing counterparts, they all performed especially poorly on implosion trials. These results were read as a demonstration that the multiple-object tracking system in individuals with WS operates under the same object-based constraints that hold in TD and is only quantitatively but not qualitatively different than what is seen in normal development.
Article 6: ‘Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial, Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental Science’
Dunham and Olson present a review of the literature showing that research on social categorization has focused almost exclusively on perceptions of individuals chosen to be clear or prototypical members of discrete and usually dichotomous social categories. They militate for a more inclusive science that also makes room for diversity by including multiracial, gender-nonconforming, or intersex targets. Especially useful is their highlighting of our collective tendency to pathologize atypicality (e.g., to have historically viewed persons of mixed race or gender as automatically deviant and in need of being somehow fixed or excluded).
Early on in their essay, the authors express some concern that their account might be “housed” in the wrong special issue. Notwithstanding the utility of their needed reminders that our impulse to find dichotomies where none exist often undermines our science, I share their initial concerns about housing choice and hope that they will find more accommodating bedfellows in the future.
DICHOTOMIES REDUX
It is reported that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, conductors on the subways linking that then-divided city were obliged to stop (as borders on the surface were crossed) and change uniforms before the train could proceed. Analogously, something not unlike this obligation still seems required of contemporary cognitive scientists as they attempt to transit freely between what are construed as surface-level environmental matters and other deeper-level matters of DNA and neuroanatomy. Be as interdisciplinary as you will, the lesson goes, but, whatever else, do not imagine that you are free to drag matters of personality or culture into the world of neurology or to settle social disputes by appealing to genotypic variation. That is, decades after the Iron Curtain came down, transiting social/cognitive scientific barriers still ordinarily requires a complete change of ideological uniforms. All conceptual baggage, including pockets full of concept terms and whole methodologies, continue to belong to one or the other of these discipline-driven domains and (should cross-disciplinary travel be planned) still need to be discarded in favor of entirely different scholarly outfits. All of this stripping down in public has grated on our own modest sensibilities and has prompted us to seek out some means of dressing up our ideas in ways that are less chameleon-like—ways that are hoped to be judged suitable on all sides of such conceptual borders. One undertaking that would move the discipline closer to these stated goals would be to “simply” abandon the notion of TD, and like students of ordinary development, learn to proceed without wrongly imagining that there was some rock-solid standard of TD against which various forms of deviancy could be measured.
References
- Gjerde, P. F., & Onishi, M. (2000). Selves, cultures, and nations: The psychological imagination of the Japanese in the era of globalization. Human Development, 43, 216–226.
- Nietzsche, F. (1988). The wanderer and his shadow. In R. J. Hollingdale (Ed.), A Nietzsche reader. London, England: Penguin (original published in 1880).