Introduction

The concept for this special issue emerged in the summer of 2010, when a small group of cognitive scientists—including some authors of papers in this volume—assembled for an informal thought session regarding the status of research on cognitive development in the context of the explosive growth in the field of cognitive neuroscience. As is well known, the past few decades have seen enormous growth in the brain sciences, and intense attention to questions of how we understand characteristics of the mind as embodied in a physical system, the brain. Moreover, the past decade has witnessed particular growth in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, with increasing numbers of empirical papers and specialized volumes published, driven not only by improvements and availability of new methods appropriate to infants and children, but also by the recognition that if we are to understand cognitive function and how it is carried out by the brain, we will have to understand how both mind and brain develop—how they change over the lifetime.