Editorial perspective: Leaving the baby in the bathwater in neurodevelopmental research.

Researchers argue that studying children with conditions like autism and ADHD in artificial lab settings hasn't led to helpful real-world insights. Instead, they suggest studying children in their natural environments - at home, school, and in daily activities. They believe this approach will better help us understand how children's brains develop and lead to more practical ways to support them.

This editorial argues that traditional neurodevelopmental research methods, which study children in controlled laboratory settings isolated from their natural environments, have failed to produce translatable insights despite extensive investigation. The authors propose a paradigm shift towards naturalistic research approaches that embrace complex, multivariate datasets and user-defined contexts rather than experimental control through isolation. They present three examples demonstrating how studying stress processing, early activity levels in ADHD, and social brain development in autism within natural environments could yield new conceptual and translatable insights into neurodevelopment. This perspective challenges the field to reconsider fundamental research methodologies.

Suggests researchers should prioritize naturalistic study methods over controlled laboratory settings when investigating neurodevelopmental conditions. This could lead to more environmentally relevant findings that better translate to real-world interventions and support strategies for children and families.

This is an editorial perspective rather than empirical research. No data or systematic evidence is presented to support the arguments. The three worked examples mentioned are not detailed in the abstract, limiting assessment of the proposed approach's validity.

Neurodevelopmental conditions are characterised by differences in the way children interact with the people and environments around them. Despite extensive investigation, attempts to uncover the brain mechanisms that underpin neurodevelopmental conditions have yet to yield any translatable insights. We contend that one key reason is that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists study brain function by taking children away from their environment, into a controlled lab setting. Here, we discuss recent research that has aimed to take a different approach, moving away from experimental control through isolation and stimulus manipulation, and towards approaches that embrace the measurement and targeted interrogation of naturalistic, user-defined and complex, multivariate datasets.

We review three worked examples (of stress processing, early activity level in ADHD and social brain development in autism) to illustrate how these new approaches might lead to new conceptual and translatable insights into neurodevelopment.