Exercise DEV • Development

Name:____________________________

Published

March 31, 2026

Modified

January 29, 2026

Goals

  1. Practice taking a developmental neuroscience perspective to psychological phenomena.
  2. Illustrate how taking such a perspective does or does not inform understanding about a particular phenomenon.

Activity

  1. Choose a psychological domain that interests you.
  2. In the spirit of (Blumberg & Adolph, 2023), write a short essay (3-5 pp) where you apply a developmental neuroscience perspective to the domain. In doing so, concisely answer the following questions:
  • How does psychological functioning change over development?
  • What brain system(s) are most directly implicated in the phenomenon?
  • Does our current understanding of developmental patterns in these systems provide useful information about the domain?
  • What information about brain structure or function is needed to understand the phenomenon more thoroughly?

Submission details

  • Submit your write-up by 2026-04-02 via the Canvas dropbox.
  • If you work with other people, please indicate the name(s) of your co-authors in your document. You need not include them in the document file name, however.
  • If you found any resources that were especially useful to you in answering these questions, please cite them.

References

Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(3), 233–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.014