ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the key ideas at the heart of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's thinking, the modularity. Modularity is the idea that the cognition is largely composed of independent, domain-specific cognitive components, as revealed by the possibility of selective damage in adulthood. Annette felt strongly that modularity had been inappropriately applied to the study of developmental disorders through the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that advances in neuroscience have caused modularity to be recast from an a priori design principle, which it would make good sense for potential cognitive systems to employ, to a data-driven concept based on how the brain is actually working. It illustrates the latter point by presenting data from Annette’s final project on infant development in Down syndrome, which uses graph theoretical analyses of electrophysiological brain imaging data to explore functional network structure in the brain activity of the young children.
