Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Who is Annette Karmiloff-Smith?

Annette Karmiloff-Smith is 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, University College, London. She is an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome.

Professor Karmiloff-Smith argues 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" module, or that children with specific language impairment lack a genetically determined "language module".

Karmiloff-Smith has 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 argues, much more complicated. Development comes about as a result of back-propagating interactions between gene, brain, behavior, and the environment; "modules" appear relatively late in development. Since developmental disorders arise from problems during development 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.