Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Annette Dionne Karmiloff-Smith (born July 18, 1938 in London - † December 19, 2016 ) was a British developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist ( connectionism ), known for research and theories on the cognitive development of children and the causes of developmental disorders in children.

Karmiloff-Smith was born to Smith and the daughter of a London tailor, attended the Edmonton County grammar school from 1949 and the Institut Français in London from 1954 to 1957.

She was originally a simultaneous interpreter for French / English at the UN in Geneva, began to be interested in language development in children and studied in Geneva in the 1970s with Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder . In 1970 she received her intermediate diploma in experimental psychology and in 1977 she received her PhD from Piaget. In Geneva she was one of the pioneers of the microgenetic method in developmental psychology. She carried out research in Geneva and the Netherlands and returned to London in 1985 as a researcher in the Cognitive Development Unit of the Medical Research Council at University College London (Institute of Child Health) and Honorary Research Fellow at Great Ormond Street Hospital . For the last ten years of her life she was a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London (Center for Brain and Cognitive Development, Development Neurocognition Lab).

She examined the inherited Williams-Beuren syndrome (and other diseases such as Down syndrome , fragile X syndrome ) and found them to be more complex than previously thought and could not be causally restricted to one brain area (according to a modular theory of brain functions) due to the dynamics of the interaction of different areas of the brain in the course of the development of the brain in children. Her theories were then applied to other developmental deficits such as autism.

According to their theory, the modularization of knowledge in the brain was the result of a development process (representational redescription) and not necessarily innate.

Most recently, she turned to Alzheimer's disease . The starting point was the fact that all patients with Down syndrome later showed the typical anatomical features of Alzheimer's disease in the brain, even if they did not suffer from its symptoms. According to her, there was a possible protective mechanism in patients with Down syndrome.

She also wrote popular science books on the mental development of early children (Everything Your Baby Would Ask, If Only He or She Could Talk she wrote with her daughter Kyra). She has also appeared on radio shows such as The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4.

In 2002 she received the European Latsis Prize . She was a Fellow of the British Academy (1993), a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999) and CBE (2004). She was a member of the Academia Europaea (1991).

Fonts

• Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. In: Trends in Cognitive Science. Vol. 2, No. 10, 1998, pp. 389-398, doi : 10.1016 / S1364-6613 (98) 01230-3 .
• Beyond modularity. A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1992, ISBN 0-262-11169-1 .
• with Jeffrey L. Elman, Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, Kim Plunkett: Rethinking Innateness. A Connectionist Perspective on Development (= Neural Network Modeling and Connectionism. 10). MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1996, ISBN 0-262-05052-8 .
• Baby it's you. A unique insight into the first three years of the developing baby. Ebury Press, London 1994, ISBN 0-09-178572-3 .
• with Kyra Karmiloff: Everything Your Baby Would Ask, If Only He or She Could Talk. Ward Lock, London 1998, ISBN 0-7063-7573-4 .
• Williams syndrome, In: Current Biology . Vol. 17, No. 24, 2007, R1035 – R1036, doi : 10.1016 / j.cub.2007.09.037 .

literature

• Jeffrey Elman, Lorraine K. Tyler, Mark H. Johnson: Annette Dionne Karmiloff-Smith, July 18, 1938 - December 19, 2016 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape XVII , 2018, p. 29-34 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Reminder page at Birkbeck College
• Obituary by Jeffrey Elman, Lorraine Tyler, The Guardian, Jan. 26, 2017