Annette Karmiloff-Smith

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

FBA FMedSci (1938–2016) was a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Before moving to Birbeck, she was Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at

Institute of Child Health The UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) is an academic department of the Faculty of Population Health Sciences of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1946 and together ...

University College, London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

. She was an expert in

developmental disorder Developmental disorders comprise a group of psychiatric conditions originating in childhood that involve serious impairment in different areas. There are several ways of using this term. The most narrow concept is used in the category "Specific Di ...

s, with a particular interest in

Williams syndrome Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder that affects many parts of the body. Facial features frequently include a broad forehead, underdeveloped chin, short nose, and full cheeks. Mild to moderate intellectual disability is observed in people ...

. Professor Karmiloff-Smith argued against approaches that take a modality-specific approach to developmental disorders - approaches that state, for example, that autism arises because of a failure of the "

theory of mind In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others' mental states may be different fro ...

" module, or that children with

specific language impairment Specific language impairment (SLI) (the term developmental language disorder is preferred by some) is diagnosed when a child's language does not develop normally and the difficulties cannot be accounted for by generally slow development, physical ...

lack a genetically determined "language module". Karmiloff-Smith argued that these approaches assume a "mosaic-like" approach to cognitive development - according to which different systems within the brain develop separately from each other, based purely on information coded in the genes. The real picture of development is, she argued, much more complicated (see

Interactive Specialization Interactive Specialization is a theory of brain development proposed by the British developmental cognitive neuroscientist Mark Johnson, formerly head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London, London an ...

). Development comes about as a result of back-propagating interactions between gene, brain, behavior, and the environment; "modules" (those parts of the brain that are, for example, specialized at processing language) appear relatively late in development. Since developmental disorders arise from problems ''during'' development (as opposed to damage to a mature system) it follows that we should expect to find performance deficits that are not linked to one particular domain, but rather spread across a whole range of different performance impairments. Karmiloff-Smith supported her theories by her research work into

. This rare syndrome was originally thought to manifest itself as abnormally low IQ, accompanied by "normal" ability to process social cues. In a series of papers (e.g.), Karmiloff-Smith and colleagues discovered that impairments in Williams syndrome are far more widespread than had previously been appreciated. Her theories have been further supported by work in other fields. For example, autistic children have been found to be impaired not just at Theory of Mind but also at a variety of tasks including motion perception, visual search and multi-tasking (e.g.), a finding that domain-specific theories have difficulty accounting for. Karmiloff-Smith authored a number of books and academic articles, most notably ''Beyond Modularity'' in 1992 and ''

Rethinking Innateness ''Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development'' is a book regarding gene/environment interaction by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett published in 199 ...

'' with

Jeffrey Elman Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks. In 1990, he introduce ...

, Mark Johnson,

Elizabeth Bates Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psyc ...

, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett in 1996. She died on 19 December 2016 at the age of 78.Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith
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References

External links

at Developmental Neurocognition Lab
Developmental Neurocognition Lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Karmiloff-Smith, Annette 1938 births 2016 deaths British cognitive neuroscientists British women neuroscientists Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Cognitive development researchers Developmental psychologists Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences (United Kingdom) Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society