Neurocognitive functioning of children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities and psychiatric disorders: profile characteristics and predictors of behavioural problems.

Children with MBID and psychiatric disorders are hampered by a strongly diminished processing speed and working memory capacity, together resulting in an overall limited processing capacity that may underlie the general developmental delays on domains that depend on fast and parallel processing of information (i.e. language, reading, mathematics and more complex forms of social cognition). Neurocognitive vulnerabilities are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain internalising and externalising problems; rather, a mismatch between the support needs and adaptations these children need, arising from their diminished processing capacity, and the inadequacy of the environment to compensate for this vulnerability may be of relevance.