What has changed in 18 years? Reflections on Ansari & Karmiloff-Smith (2002)

In this chapter the author recalls the time when he was studying for his PhD under Annette Karmiloff-Smith's supervision at the London Institute of Child Health. He describes his experience of co-authoring of a paper with Annette that was a turning point in his research career. This paper explored atypical trajectories of number development from a neuroconstructivist perspective and was published in 2002. It focused on the insights offered by developmental disorders into the cognitive building blocks of numerical cognition, including the relationship between analogue representations of quantity and symbolic representations of number. Annette was the author's doctoral supervisor. He worked under her supervision from 1999 to 2003 and continued collaborating with Annette long after that. She pushed him out of his comfort limits, made him think harder than anybody had done before and inspired him to have the confidence to try being a scientist.