Neural Plasticity and Development

Abstract

This chapter illustrates that learning and experience affect the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities through mechanisms of reorganization of functional brain architecture, that is, through neural plasticity on a macroscopic scale. We begin by imparting some fundamentals about the mechanisms that allow the brain to organize and reorganize its functional structure. Then we describe basic aspects of neural plasticity that underlie experience-dependent plasticity, focusing on cortical representational cortex as the best investigated model of macroscopic plasticity. Examples for experience-induced cortical reorganization with its perceptual and cognitive correlates and possible adaptive and maladaptive consequences follows. In reviewing the development of language through the lens of neural plasticity, we point out elements of an emerging new paradigm in developmental cognitive neuroscience.