A Clinician's Guide to Normal Cognitive Development in Childhood

Book excerpt: Clinicians and practitioners-in-training can often lose sight of the normal developmental landscape that underlies behavior, especially in the field of cognitive development. It exists in an insular bubble within the broader field of psychology, and within each sub-domain there is a wide continuum between the anchors of atypical and optimal development. Clinicians need to learn, and to be reminded of, the unique peculiarities of developing cognitive skills in order to appreciate normal developmental phenomena. In A Clinician's Guide to Normal Cognitive Development in Childhood, every chapter provides students and established professionals with an accessible set of descriptions of normal childhood cognition, accompanied by suggestions for how to think about normal development in a clinical context. Each sub-topic within cognitive development is explicated through a succinct presentation of empirical data in that area, followed by a discussion of the ethical implications. With an extensive review of data and clinical practice techniques, professionals and students alike will benefit enormously from this resource.