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Informationen zum Autor John Morton is the former Director of the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Development Unit. He is now Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. Klappentext This long-awaited and ground-breaking book from cognitive scientist John Morton helps to clarify the nature of developmental disorders. It challenges the basis of standard behaviourally based diagnostic practice, showing how the role of biology and cognition is crucial to understanding the underlying nature of these disorders. It also sets out a clear method for assessing and comparing the many alternative theories. An understanding of developmental disorders depends on being able to address the issue of cause and on making the link between disorder and normal process. These were the driving forces behind the emergence of the causal modelling methodology at the Cognitive Development Unit in London by the author and his colleague Uta Frith. John Morton elucidates this method and uses it ruthlessly to compare different theories of particular developmental disorders and to pinpoint their weaknesses. The result is a book that will have a profound impact on research and thinking in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and medicine. Zusammenfassung Based on the idea that understanding developmental disorders requires us to talk about biological! cognitive! behavioral and environmental factors! and to talk about causal relationships among these elements! this book explains what causal modelling is and how to do it. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface and Acknowledgements viii Chapter 1 Introducing Cause 1 Cause and public issues 1 Cause and individual events: 'Why did Romeo die?' 6 Some more reasons for not looking at individual cases 9 The need for a framework for thinking in 10 Creating a tool: the problem of notation 14 An example of the limits of language 15 An invitation to consider diagrams as a tool 18 A tool for representing causal relationships 18 Chapter 2 Introducing Cognition 20 One thing I do want you to believe 20 Reductionism 22 Can we rely on behaviour? 24 The IQ example: a note of caution 27 Why cause needs cognition 29 Chapter 3 Representing Causal Relationships: Technical and Formal Considerations 34 Categorizing facts 34 The causal notation 38 Starting a causal model for autism 41 Complications 46 Some easy stuff on cause and correlation 51 Other notations 54 Chapter 4 Autism: How Causal Modelling Started 67 The biological origin of autism 74 The role of cognition in defining autism 81 What is mentalizing? 86 The non-social features of autism: how to diagram ideas on weak central coherence in autism 89 Summary 92 Chapter 5 The What and the How 98 Ground rules of causal modelling 99 Chapter 6 Competing Causal Accounts of Autism 106 Representing the effects of environmental factors 107 Cognitive theories of autism 112 Chapter 7 The Problem of Diagnosis 133 Diagnosis and cause: relying on behaviour 134 The Spanish Inquisition example: the dangers of labelling 135 Problems of diagnostic practice 140 Variability 148 Changes over time: improvement and deterioration 152 The variability of the phenotype 153 On co-morbidity and the question of residual normality 158 To summarize 160 Chapter 8 A Causal Analysis of Dyslexia 161 The dyslexia debate: Is there such a thing as dyslexia? 161 The discrepancy definition of specific reading disability 164 Towards a cognitive definition 166 An X-type causal model o...
