À l'aide d'une recension des publications récentes, les résultats obtenus en neurosciences sont appliqués à la pédopsychiatrie et particulièrement au TDA-H et au syndrome de stress post-traumatique chez l'enfant. L'intégration de la neurobiologie à la pédopsychiatrie accroît la compréhension de la psychopathologie ainsi que la palette thérapeutique. À cette dernière, s'est ajoutée plus récemment la remédiation cognitive assistée par ordinateur pour le traitement des TDA-H.

Recent findings in neurosciences are reviewed and applied to the domain of child and adolescent psychiatry, especially ADHD and PTSD in childhood. Behavioral genetics studies highlight a bidirectional relationship between genetic and environmental factors which interact at a certain critical period during the child development. fMRI and cognitive studies in turn reveal the brain plasticity which reflects that interplay between genes and environment both at a cellular level and at the level of the neural circuitry. In keeping with those experiments, a new neurocognitive model emerges, the forward model, wherein motor and emotional aspects of an experience are imprinted in our neural networks. This neural template is then automatically and non-consciously activated when the person is interacting with another one. Applied to PTSD and ADHD, this model suggests that the therapeutic challenge which is carried along with such disorders is to prevent the youth from re-activating such a neural template. If our understanding of the child psychopathology is stimulated by neurosciences findings, the therapeutic apparatus is enlarged as well with such new venues as the computerized-assisted cognitive remediation for ADHD. Such computer devices are used to elicit the activation of new neural networks and to help out the youth inhibiting the activation of the non-adaptative previous neural pathways.