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Despite much progress in brain and cognitive sciences, attempts to connect brain function to cognition are hampered by the large explanatory gap between psychology and neurobiology. In recent years, a neurocomputational perspective has emerged as the most promising approach to integrating brain and mind. According to this perspective, the brain is a special sort of computer, a system of many parallel neural networks whose operation underlies cognition. In this paper, we present this neurocomputational perspective and examine the ways in which this new approach to explaining our mental skills differs from earlier ones. In particular, we examine its emerging insights into two domains. First, we explore the neurocomputational approach to decision-making, the adaptive guidance of behavior in the satisfaction of life maintenance goals. Decision-making is central to all mobile creatures in an uncertain environment, and this approach reveals a surprising conservation of decision-making strategies across many species. We then examine the neurocomputational approach's new insights into characterizing cognitive development. In particular, this approach offers the new framework of self-organization to characterize the complex interaction between neural developmental programs and the environment, a framework that has important implications for understanding early intervention. MRDD Research Reviews 1999;5:86–99. © 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]