A long-awaited book from developmental disorders expert John Morton, Understanding Developmental Disorders: A Causal Modelling Approach makes sense of the many competing theories about what can go wrong with early brain development, causing a child to develop outside the normal range. 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. Explains what causal modelling is and how to do it. Compares different theories about particular developmental disorders using causal modelling. Will have a profound impact on research in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and medicine.

Table of Contents:
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 of dyslexia 168 Competing theories of dyslexia 176 Non-biological causes 195 Other biological causes of reading failure 199 How do we sort among the options? 200 The relationship between acquired and developmental dyslexia 204 A theoretical update 204 Chapter 9 The Hyperkinetic Confusions 208 Drugs as diagnostic refinement 212 Types of theory 216 The problem of co-morbidity: conduct disorder and ADHD 218 The cognitive level 219 Sonuga-Barke’s dual pathway model 223 Summary 226 Chapter 10 Theories of Conduct Disorder 227 The violence inhibition mechanism (VIM) model 228 The social information processing model for aggressive children 231 The coercive parenting model of Patterson 235 The theory of life-course persistent antisocial behaviour 236 What does the application of the framework tell us about the theories? 244 Chapter 11 Tying in Biology 247 Relations between the cognitive and biological levels 247 Equivalence: brain to cognition 251 Causal influences from cognition to brain 253 Genes and cause: the end of behaviour genetics 255 Endophenotypes 264 Mouse (and other) models for human disorders 266 Chapter 12 To Conclude 270 References 273 Name Index 292 Subject Index 296