ABSTRACT

Biocultural co-constructivism is a concept new to the field of developmental neuroscience, and thus there is no precedent for modeling how cultural processes are incorporated into the developing or developed brain. In this chapter, I offer a number of suggestions for how one might think about and study the relations among brain, culture, and development. I begin by providing a brief overview of brain development, followed by a discussion of neural plasticity. I conclude by speculating as to how culture might be incorporated into neural substrate, and subsequently and conversely, how such a remodeled brain might lead to changes in behavior.

BACKGROUND

In 1997, Bloom and I published a paper in which we lamented the lack of communication among those studying behavioral development and those studying brain development (Nelson & Bloom, 1997). We argued that the impressive advances being made on both fronts – brain and behavioral development – and our knowledge of children in general would expand exponentially if there was greater cross-fertilization across disciplines. We illustrated a few examples, emphasizing most how advances in brain imaging and in our knowledge of neural plasticity may ultimately come to revolutionize our thinking about brain–behavior relations.

The arguments in favor of studying “neurobehavioral” development are as true today as when Bloom and I first proposed this in 1997. I still contend that our knowledge of the developing brain would best be grounded in knowledge of child development, and conversely, that our knowledge of child development could be vastly improved were we to explicate the neural mechanisms that underlie behavioral development.