ABSTRACT
This Carnegie Symposium celebrates a growing convergence of behavioral and neural approaches to the mechanisms of cognitive change and reflects an overall convergence of behavioral and neural approaches to all aspects of cognition and cognitive development. This chapter is a part of a corresponding convergence in my own research. In my own formative years as a psychologist, facts about underlying neural mechanisms were considered to be nearly irrelevant to understanding cognition and its development. Where I went to graduate school, we studied cognition and cognitive development on the one hand and physiological psychology on the other, and they seemed almost completely disconnected subjects. My own early experimental work stayed strictly on the cognitive side of this huge divide.
