ABSTRACT
An individual’s development across the life span entails co-constructive interactions between environmental, cultural, and socioemotional infl uences from the developmental context and the individual’s neurobiological inheritance. Crucially, individuals are not just mere passive recipients of their ecological, cultural, and neurobiological endowments; rather, they are active agents who make decisions and take actions to shape their own development. In order to better capture interactive dynamics between (a) the resources for and constraints on individual ontogeny that arise from the development context, (b) the mechanisms of brain maturation and senescence, and (c) the individual’s self-regulatory behavior, a synergistic conceptualization of development is to view an individual’s development across the life span as the development of self-regulated adaptive neurocognitive dynamics (Li, 2003, 2013) that are “embodied” in motor, sensory, and perceptual processes and “situated” in social and environmental contexts (cf. Clark, 2001; Robbins & Aydede, 2008). Viewed through the lens of self-regulated developmental adaptations of neurocognitive processes, brain circuitries and mechanisms that afford seamless interactions between motivational regulation and cognitive control are main themes for lifespan developmental neuroscience research.
