ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how the accumulating body of empirical evidence led away from the simple notion of innate modularity to an emergentist account of adult specialisation of function, considered, respectively, in the fields of evolution, genetics, and development. It reports research carried out on children of different ages as they work with a balance beam. In the balance beam task, children are given blocks of wood and asked to balance them on a thin metal bar. The book shows how atypical development could be described statistically using cross-sectional trajectory analysis, to show how the level, rate, or shape of development could be different, or to assess atypicalities in the relationship between skills. It presents a connectionist model of developmental regression in autism.
