What is Developmental Cognitive Neuropsychology?

One way of thinking about what we are trying to do in a DCN assessment is integrate these three domains of psychology: we are trying to understand a child's behaviour, emotions, functioning, development and school performance from an information-processing perspective.

The reason why this is so important is that we now know that, in complex neurodevelopmental problems such as ASD and ADHD, there are often general changes in the way the brain processes information. What we see or experience are things like problems with social relationships or behavioural impulsivity - but these are often really just surface manifestations of complex, system-wide atypicality in brain development affecting multiple cognitive domains. In other words, the brain will just be responding to and processing information differently in all sorts of ways - which is why neurodevelopmental disorders so often occur together rather than in isolation.

DCN is that area of psychology that brings all these things together and attempts to provide a comprehensive answer to why particular problems are occurring - and what their solutions might be. It draws heavily on neuropsychology and neuroscience but is applying them to a developmental context (rather than, say, to people with acquired brain injuries). A starting point is that there may well be unusual aspects to any area of information processing (and therefore brain functioning) rather than that there will be some specific problem to be identified (as might be the case in simple dyslexia).

There will inevitably be a significant overlap with what is generally done in educational psychology - and many educational psychologists are involved in doing DCN assessments. But it is also somewhat distinct from both educational and clinical psychology on the whole because it necessarily involves a neuropsychological dimension that not all professionals have experience of.  However, a DCN assessment will often lead to educational or clinical psychology interventions because that is where the relevant skills can be found.