Shadows of the living dead—potential dangers of unsafe encounters between developmental psychology and neuroscience

Abstract

This paper discusses a number of potential problems in the relationship between developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience. I argue for a need to update, rather than dismiss, the old nature/nurture debate in the light of advances in neuroscientific methods and findings about development. I argue against the danger of identifying similarity in brain activations with similarity of cognitive processing during development. I also sketch the need to develop a comparative neuroscience of cognition that addresses the problem of comparing the diverse brains of distant species such as birds and primates that, according to recent research, may share some behavioural and cognitive complexity subserved by very different neural systems.