Cognitive neuroscience has emerged over the past decades as one of the most significant research directions in all of neuroscience and psychology. More recently, the scientific interface between cognitive neuroscience and human development, developmental cognitive neuroscience, has become a hot topic. Part of the reason for the renewed interest in relating brain development to cognitive, social, and emotional change comes from advances in methodology that allow hypotheses to be generated and tested more readily than previously. One set of tools relates to brain imaging – the generation of ‘functional’ maps of brain activity based on either changes in cerebral metabolism, blood flow, or electrical activity. The three brain-imaging techniques most commonly applied to development in normal children are event-related potentials (ERPs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Another methodological advance is related to the emergence of techniques for formal computational modeling of neural networks and cognitive processes. Such models allow us to begin to bridge data on developmental neuroanatomy to data on behavioral changes associated with development. A third methodological innovation is the increasing trend for studying groups of developmental disorders (such as autism and Williams syndrome) together alongside typical development. Thus, rather than each syndrome being studied in isolation, comparisons between different typical and atypical trajectories of development are helping to reveal the extent and limits on plasticity.