Abstract

Chapter 11 summarizes the book and emphasizes that commonalities in inattentive behaviors across differing neurodevelopmental disorders do not imply a common etiology or similar cognitive pathways. The authors advocate examination across multiple levels of analysis—genetic, brain, behavioral, and cognitive— to discover disorder-specific initial states with different attention trajectories throughout development. Because development plays such a crucial role in determining attention signatures, they also emphasize the importance of early investigation of attention and its disorders, beginning in infancy, and continuing through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Further, they believe that those initiating educational and clinical interventions need to recognize disorder-specific attention impairments, rather than assuming that strategies that work well in children with ADHD will have comparable effects in children whose attention problems may well arise from very different underlying genetic and neural mechanisms.