The articles in this special issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development" examine the cognitive development of children who are following typical and atypical developmental pathways. The articles offer a mixture of theory-based considerations, reviews of the literature, and new empirical data addressing fundamental aspects of…

The next several pages are intended as a "Commentary" on the six target articles bundled together as a Special Issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development"--literature reviews and research reports all intended to "build bridges" between the study of cognitive development in typical and atypical populations.

There is a growing list of examples illustrating that infants are transitioning from having earlier abilities that appear more "universal," "broadly tuned," or "unconstrained" to having later abilities that appear more "specialized," "narrowly tuned," or "constrained." Perceptual narrowing, a well-known phenomenon related to face, speech, and…

U-shaped developmental functions, and their N-shaped cousins, have intrigued developmental psychologists for decades because they provide a compelling demonstration that development does not always entail a monotonic increase across age in a single underlying ability. Instead, the causes of development are much more complex. Indeed,…

The articles in this collection consider one very interesting puzzle of development: U-shaped developmental functions. At some point during development, an organism might exhibit what seems like a regression from its expected developmental trajectory and, according to continuity models of development, this is aberrant. In this special issue,…

It has been 20 years since Bever's (1982) and Strauss and Stavy's (1982) books on U-shaped functions in human development were published. The three target articles in this issue describe several old and new U-shaped functions and new theoretical explanations for their existence. In this article, the authors will comment on two aspects of U-shaped…

There is by this point no doubt that backward, regressive, negative or degenerative movements occur in cognitive development. The question is "why?" The challenges of the phenomenon have been and continue to be mainly two: identify the range and variety of systematic backward movements that appear in development; and, provide better and better…

We are pleased with the commentators' thoughtful reactions to our study, as they make it clear that the study met its major goal--identifying age differences that suggest developmental changes in the learning process and the strengthening of executive processes in the second decade of life.

Kuhn and Pease (p. 279, this issue) provide evidence for a change in learning as a result of increasing executive control during later childhood. Although the ability to inhibit information that biases answers in a reasoning task may account for their findings, the opportunity to gain specific experiences and engage different strategies in…

The Kuhn and Pease (p. 279, this issue) article advances the fields of cognitive development and learning by integrating work on executive functions, metacognition, and scientific reasoning. The article also expands developmental work to older children and adults, to personal beliefs, and to social information, and reinvigorates the construct of…