ABSTRACT
Pregnancy is a challenging topic for research: it is a normal and even essential part of everyday life. It is a natural biological event: a physical process underpinned by a complex physiology. It is a psychological event and a personal transition; its meaning is also socially and culturally determined. It is time-limited. Research may be concerned with any one or more of these co-existing and wide-ranging elements but in doing so it is inevitably drawn into contradictory and paradoxical conclusions. Our own starting point as pregnancy researchers was a personal observation of a major memory lapse that occurred at work during a pregnancy. This lapse was immediately attributed to the state of being pregnant. Why such an attribution should have been made was what led to our studies of cognition in pregnancy. In re¯ecting upon the material we collected, it was obvious that we could not simply describe a set of cognitive outcomes without placing these in the context in which they were reported and that this context was not simply `being pregnant' but a sophisticated interaction of those elements described above. Hence, our interest and, ten years later, this book.
