What Atypical Adults Can Teach Us about Development

In my presidential address, I described the early trap I fell into of describing the super‐baby capable of one after another adult perceptual ability, then how I discovered that two atypical populations of adults allowed me to study developmental mechanisms , namely, the role of early sensory input in sculpting the nervous system and the biological preparedness that constrains the experiential effects. Specifically, studies of adults who had …