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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.

This chapter explores the current understanding of how genetic factors contribute to human mental health in general, and in particular how they lead to disturbances that can affect public mental health in significant ways. It begins with an explanation of some basic genetic concepts crucial to understanding how genetic factors can influence human mental health. It then describes the leading research paradigm used to investigate the role of genetic factors and highlights a number of discoveries made in implementing this paradigm. The chapter closes with a discussion of the challenges that remain for the better understanding how genetic factors contribute to mental health and why ongoing research in this area is crucial.

This chapter describes research on the hindsight bias, which is the tendency for people to reappraise events after the fact as if they had been known all along. It also addresses the question of how time influences hindsight bias. It begins by briefly summarizing the three dominant methodological paradigms researchers have used to study hindsight judgments, considering the influence of time in relation to each of these dominant experimental approaches and highlighting relations between foresight (a priori prediction) and hindsight (a posteriori reconstruction) within each research paradigm. Then, it considers prevailing theoretical models of the processes that underlie the development of hindsight bias over time. It concludes by comparing and contrasting the role time plays within each mediational model, constructing an integrative temporal model and suggesting potentially fruitful avenues for future research on the role of time in the development of hindsight bias.