Childhood head injuries differ from adult head injuries in some significant respects. They occur against a background of ongoing physical and cognitive development. Cognitive capacities often change with time post-injury. But for children changes are affected by two processes of functional plasticity, one concerned with recovery, one with development. The impact of the injury is moderated by age/developmental stage.
In recent years there has been a new focus on the longitudinal comparison of children post-injury with appropriate control groups. Advances in neuropsychological assessment...

The Biological and Social Determinants of Child Development stimulates cross-disciplinary communication and research collaboration in the field of child development. While the papers in this issue seem diverse in terms of topic and discipline, there are a number of common themes: *critical period for brain development and the importance of specific environmental input during this period; *importance of early brain development and enriched environments is supported in articles describing findings from human studies; *potential for brain plasticity following specialized retraining is found...

The articles in this special issue form three overlapping themes: papers concerned with language development, other aspects of cognition, and interpersonal relations and personality. The papers provide strong evidence of the importance of the study of individuals with neurodevelopmental genetic disorders for enhancing the understanding of the complex manner in which initial genetic differences impact on both behavior (performance) and processing strategies from infancy through adulthood. Much work remains to be done, not only from a psychological or a biological perspective but, most...