What can cognitive neuroscience tell us about human development?

The increasing availability of safe, noninvasive neuroimaging techniques has led to an explosion in cognitive neuroscience research on infants, children, and adolescents. Two justifications for this research are: (1) that neuroscience methods can tell us more about the mechanisms underpinning development than behavioural studies alone, and (2) that the insights gained will have a feed- forward impact on clinical and educational practice and policy. Given recent scepticism towards both arguments, this paper brings together examples from different fields within developmental cognitive neuroscience to discuss specific cognitive domains and both typical and atypical pediatric populations, using a variety of different neuroimaging technologies. The paper addresses the progress made in developmental psychology by the use of functional near- infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography/event related potentials (EEG/ERP) in both typical and atypical development. It is argued that cognitive neuroscience has provided new hypotheses that have served to drive the field forward and clarify developmental mechanisms, as well as neural markers for working memory training and for distinguishing behavioural scores " in the normal range" from their atypical neural underpinnings.