Developmental Psychobiology: An Interdisciplinary Science

This text is the first to provide a coherent theoretical treatment of the flourishing new field of developmental psychobiology which has arisen in recent years on the crest of exciting advances in evolutionary biology, developmental neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory.

Michel and Moore, two of the field's key pioneers and researchers, integrate primary source information from research in both biological and psychological disciplines in a clear account of the frontier of biopsychological investigation and theorizing.

Explicitly conceptual and historical, the first three chapters set the stage for a clear understanding of the field and its research, with particular attention to the nature-nurture question. The next three chapters each provide information about a basic subfield in biology (genetics, evolution, embryology) that is particularly relevant for developmental studies of behavior. These are followed by extended treatments of three spheres of inquiry (behavioral embryology, cognitive neuroscience, animal behavior) in terms of how a successful interdisciplinary approach to behavioral development might look. A final chapter comments on some of the unique aspects of development study.

From this detailed and clearly organized text, students will achieve a firm grasp of some of science's most fertile questions about the relation between evolution and development, the relation between brain and cognitive development, the value of a natural history approach to animal behavior—and what it teaches us about humans—and much more. Each chapter contains material that questions the conventional wisdom held in many subdisciplines of biology and psychology. Throughout, the text challenges students to think creatively as it thoroughly grounds them in the field's approach to such topics as behavioral-genetic analysis, the concept of innateness, molecular genetics and development, neuroembryology, behavioral embryology, maturation, cognition, and ethology.

A Bradford Book

George F. Michel is Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.