Abstract

Developmental neuroscience is generally understood as a field that studies the development of cognitive abilities and their relation to brain mechanisms during childhood by means of employing various methods, often using a combination of observational and experimental behavioural techniques with neuroscientific methods, such as functional and anatomic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). With this approach, developmental neuroscience pursues at least three different goals. A first goal of developmental neuroscience is to understand the development of cognitive abilities by using neuroscientific methods. In other words, when pursuing this goal, developmental neuroscientists ask at what age children possess certain cognitive abilities. This question is not only empirically important but also philosophically relevant, for instance, with respect to the question as to how we should think about pre-linguistic, nonconceptual ways of thinking about the world, when and how children acquire the skills necessary for understanding and interacting with others or when and how they develop a concept of themselves as individual agents. Findings from developmental neuroscience thus have the potential to inform our understanding of different forms of thinking and cognizing (e.g. linguistic and conceptual compared with pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual) as well as our conception of children and childhood as such. The latter, in turn, will also have implications for questions relating to the philosophy of education or to ethical questions in relation to children and their rights. A second, related goal is to understand brain development and its relation to cognitive function at different ages. Here, typical questions would be whether the maturation of specific brain structures supports the emergence of certain cognitive abilities or whether cognitive abilities are supported by different brain structures at different points in development. Third, in addition to investigating the presence of certain cognitive abilities, their neural mechanisms at different ages and their development, we can also take advantage of development to inform our understanding of mature cognitive and neural mechanisms. That is to say that we can see developmental neuroscience as a lens through which to gain a clearer picture of cognition in general, independently of questions relating to its development. For instance, developmental neuroscience can help us to understand the modularity or composition of different cognitive processes because different subcomponents of cognitive abilities may emerge at different time points in development. Studying change in these cognitive abilities may therefore reveal the individual subcomponents of the ability in question, whereas in adults all components may work together at the same time making it harder to disentangle them. In this sense, the developmental approach can follow a similar logic to studies with patients suffering from selective impairments, for example due to brain lesions. In this way, developmental neuroscience can deliver important insights into various issues in the philosophy of mind and cognition in general. In the following, we will explain these different goals in more detail and illustrate them with specific examples from developmental neuroscience, focusing on the development of language and social cognition. In doing so, we will at the same time demonstrate various ways in which the different methods of developmental neuroscience listed earlier can be employed.