Commentary: Becoming social--a commentary on Happé & Frith (2014)

Abstract

The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is now established as a discipline at the nexus of the broader fields of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Sitting in its rear view mirror, but gaining rapidly, is the nascent discipline of developmental social neuroscience. Given the relative youth of this field, it is not surprising that a great deal of energy has gone into generating a rich corpus of empirical data. As a result, however, we have a plethora of findings but lack a conceptual framework in which to place, integrate, and interpret them. The splendid Annual Research Review article published in this issue by Happé and Frith addresses this shortcoming. The authors offer a scholarly account of developmental social neuroscience. Impressively, their review goes far beyond what is known about typical social development; the paper also discusses a variety of disorders of development, ranging from the rare (e.g., Mobius syndrome) to the highly prevalent (e.g., autism). By including a discussion of disruptions in development, the authors achieve two goals: to educate the reader about a range of developmental disorders and to leverage what is known about these disorders to shed light on the mechanisms supporting typical social development.

Keywords: Developmental neuroscience; autism; social cognition; social development.