Developmental cognitive neuroscience: Origins, issues, and prospects

This commentary explains how the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience (DCN) holds the promise of a much wider interdisciplinary integration across sciences concerned with development: psychology, molecular genetics, neurobiology, and evolutionary developmental biology. First we present a brief history of DCN, including the key theoretical issues it addresses; then we comment on how the four articles in this special section exemplify a DCN approach and raise important theoretical and methodological issues for the field of DCN; and we close by considering the future of DCN, especially the key role developmental psychologists can play as DCN becomes increasingly interdisciplinary.