Invited symposia
Educational Neuroscience and Developmental Theory
Organizer: Usha Goswami (Cambridge, UK)
Speakers: Usha Goswami, Michael Thomas, Denis Mareschal, & Denes Szucs
This symposium draws on data gathered in educational neuroscience studies to assess developmental theories of scientific reasoning, maths learning difficulties, reading difficulties and neuroconstructivism. Michael Thomas assesses neuroconstructivism, the integration of contemporary theories of functional brain development and constructivist theories of cognitive development, including notions of embrainment and embodiment. He analyses the constraints between levels of description and the importance of context, adopting a focus on conceptual development, sensitive periods, the social brain, and adolescent brain development. Denis Mareschal defines scientific reasoning as a complex set of skills that involves managing extensive and sometimes conflicting knowledge, as well as standard domain-general inference and reasoning skills. He draws together evidence from primary school children, teenagers and adults suggesting that functional inhibitory control systems are essential for supporting counter-intuitive reasoning in science domains, including evidence from intervention studies. Denes Szucs assesses the neural evidence for core deficit theories versus multi-dimensional theories of math learning difficulties. Core deficit theories focus on an approximate number representation in the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS). However, the IPS is related to a many cognitive functions, and Szucs reviews data suggesting that diagnosing math learning difficulties requires mapping a multi-dimensional variable space. Finally, Usha Goswami assesses the ‘phonological deficit’ theory of developmental dyslexia using neural data gathered during oral language-listening tasks. She shows that neural data finesses our understanding of ‘phonological deficit’ theory. Children with dyslexia do not develop ‘noisy’ speech-based representations, rather they develop phonological representations that differ from those of other children regarding low-frequency envelope information.
Bringing attention theory to the forefront of developmental cognitive neuroscience: infant origins, neurodivergent trajectories, and the dynamic interplay with complex environments
Organizer: Gaia Scerif (Oxford, UK)
Speakers: Gaia Scerif, Josue Rico-Pico, Paul Matusz, & Virginia Carter Leno
Across the lifespan, attentional processes are thought to play a crucial role in biasing incoming information in favour of what is relevant to further processing, for encoding into learning, memory, and to guide action. First, Josué Rico-Picó will present evidence on changes in oscillatory brain activity in relation to the early development of executive attention. These data suggest that, from infancy, paying attention consists of tuning the mind with the environment, to enable the flexible adaptation of responses in accordance with internal goals. Paul Matusz will discuss electroencephalographic data shedding light on the rich interplay between visual attentional control and complex environments in neurotypically developing children, from underlying brain mechanisms to the educational outcome effects. Key for attention theories is to consider the multi-sensory nature of the environment. Virginia Carter Leno will present a talk entitled Anterior Modifiers in the Emergence of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Gaia Scerif will conclude by appraising complementary computational modelling, electrophysiological data, eye-tracking and longitudinal approaches, to inform our understanding of attention dynamics across neurotypical development and for neurodivergent individuals. These seminars highlight multiple parameters feeding into how we become skilled diverse adult attentive observers. These complementary perspectives highlight the need for theories of attention development to consider how, even from early infancy, attention is influenced by goals, by the prior history of attentive learners, by their diversity and by their interactions with complex multisensory environments.
Advancing Theories of Learning and Memory Development with Neuroimaging Methods
Organizer: Simona Ghetti (UC Davis, USA)
Speakers: Simona Ghetti, Yana Fandakova, Kepa Paz-Alonso, & Yee Lee Shing
Over the past decade, the increasing use of neuroscientific methods has enriched our understanding of developmental processes. This symposium will focus on mechanisms of learning and memory at different points in development and will underscore how the use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) methods illuminated changes in memory processes and representations as a function of age and experience. Ghetti and collaborators examine the neural substrates of newly learned words in 2-year-olds to clarify how these words might become integrated in the lexicon over time. Shing and Schommarz focus on the effects of sleep and delay on 5-to 7-year-olds’ and adults’ memory to explain how consolidation processes might affect the quality and persistence of memory representations. Fandakova and collaborators investigate changes in the neural ensemble contributing to performing motor sequences in 7-to 10-year-olds and adults to elucidate the relative contribution of control processes as a function of practice. Finally, Paz-Alonso and Rodríguez-Gonzalo explore how neural processes underlying semantic knowledge support memory encoding and retrieval across the life span to shed light on the interaction between knowledge and memory processes such as familiarity and recollection. Overall, the symposium will provide new insight on timely and theoretically rich questions, which could not be addressed without the use of fMRI methods.
Children’s Brains Can Show How They Understand the Mind
Organizer: Mark Sabbagh (Queen’s University, Canada)
Speakers: Lindsay Bowman, Hilary Richardson, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann, & Elizabeth Redcay
Children’s social cognitive skills include foundational understandings in theory of mind – a set of intuitive beliefs about the ways in which people’s behaviors are caused by mental states such as intentions, desires, beliefs, and emotions. To date, long-standing debates concerning the ontogenetic origins of theory of mind and its development have been addressed almost exclusively with evidence from behavioral experimental studies. This symposium will highlight ways in which recent work in developmental cognitive neuroscience has provided a unique and vital source of data to bear on these theoretical issues. The first talk (Richardson) will provide evidence that conceptual advances in theory of mind reasoning throughout childhood are paced by the emergence and development of domain-specific mechanisms that also support theory of mind in adults, rather than more domain-general neural mechanisms. Our second talk (Grosse Wiesmann) will show evidence of a dissociation between the neural systems used for implicit and explicit theory-of-mind reasoning, which in turn suggests that infants may differ from young children in the mechanisms they use to reason about the mind. A third talk (Redcay) will outline the ways in which an interactive, “second-person” neuroscience approach can be used to characterize developmental changes in how implicit and explicit processes are recruited for reasoning about mental states within the context of a social interaction. Our final talk (Bowman) will also capitalize interactive neuroscience techniques to explore in real-time how caregiving experiences may tune the infant brain to support development of early social-cognitive skills, including theory of mind.
