Seminars

Yuko Munakata presents evidence challenging capacity-only accounts of self-control and explains how experience, effort, and expected payoff shape executive-function engagement and later outcomes.

Digital Minds: Brain Development in the Age of Technology examines how our increasingly connected world shapes mental and cognitive health. From screen time and social media to virtual interactions, this seminar delves into the latest research on how technology influences brain development, relationships, and emotional well-being. Join us to explore strategies for harnessing technology's benefits while mitigating its potential challenges, empowering you to thrive in a digital age.

2024 BACN Early-Career Prize Lecture Many of our decisions affect other people. Our choices can decelerate climate change, stop the spread of infectious diseases, and directly help or harm others. Prosocial behaviours – decisions that help others – could contribute to reducing the impact of these challenges, yet their computational and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will present recent work that examines prosocial motivation, how willing we are to incur costs to help others, prosocial learning, how we learn from the outcomes of our choices when they affect other people, and prosocial preferences, our self-reports of helping others. Throughout the talk, I will outline the possible computational and neural bases of these behaviours, and how they may differ from young adulthood to old age.

Despite her still poor visual acuity and minimal visual experience, a 2-3 month old baby will reliably respond to facial expressions, smiling back at her caretaker or older sibling. But what if that same baby had been deprived of her early visual experience? Will she be able to appropriately respond to seemingly mundane interactions, such as a peer’s facial expression, if she begins seeing at the age of 10? My work is part of Project Prakash, a dual humanitarian/scientific mission to identify and treat curably blind children in India and then study how their brain learns to make sense of the visual world when their visual journey begins late in life. In my talk, I will give a brief overview of Project Prakash, and present findings from one of my primary lines of research: plasticity of face perception with late sight onset. Specifically, I will discuss a mixed methods effort to probe and explain the differential windows of plasticity that we find across different aspects of distributed face recognition, from distinguishing a face from a nonface early in the developmental trajectory, to recognizing facial expressions, identifying individuals, and even identifying one’s own caretaker. I will draw connections between our empirical findings and our recent theoretical work hypothesizing that children with late sight onset may suffer persistent face identification difficulties because of the unusual acuity progression they experience relative to typically developing infants. Finally, time permitting, I will point to potential implications of our findings in supporting newly-sighted children as they transition back into society and school, given that their needs and possibilities significantly change upon the introduction of vision into their lives.

Over the last decade, research on curiosity – the desire to seek new information – has been rapidly growing. Several studies have shown that curiosity elicits activity within the dopaminergic circuit and thereby enhances hippocampus-dependent learning. However, given this new field of research, we do not have a good understanding yet of (i) how curiosity-based learning changes across the lifespan, (ii) why some people show better learning improvements due to curiosity than others, and (iii) whether lab-based research on curiosity translates to how curiosity affects information seeking in real life. In this talk, I will present a series of behavioural and neuroimaging studies that address these three questions about curiosity. First, I will present findings on how curiosity and interest affect learning differently in childhood and adolescence. Second, I will show data on how inter-individual differences in the magnitude of curiosity-based learning depend on the strength of resting-state functional connectivity within the cortico-mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit. Third, I will present findings on how the level of resting-state functional connectivity within this circuit is also associated with the frequency of real-life information seeking (i.e., about Covid-19-related news). Together, our findings help to refine our recently proposed framework – the Prediction, Appraisal, Curiosity, and Exploration (PACE) framework – that attempts to integrate theoretical ideas on the neurocognitive mechanisms of how curiosity is elicited, and how curiosity enhances learning and information seeking. Furthermore, our findings highlight the importance of curiosity research to better understand how curiosity can be harnessed to improve learning and information seeking in real life.

Adolescent development is not only shaped by the mere passing of time and accumulating experience, but it also depends on pubertal timing and the cascade of maturational processes orchestrated by gonadal hormones. Although individual variability in puberty onset confounds adolescent studies, it has not been efficiently controlled for. Here we introduce ultrasonic bone age assessment to estimate biological maturity and disentangle the independent effects of chronological and biological age on adolescent cognitive abilities, emotional development, and brain maturation. Comparing cognitive performance of participants with different skeletal maturity we uncover the impact of biological age on both IQ and specific abilities. With respect to emotional development, we find narrow windows of highest vulnerability determined by biological age. In terms of neural development, we focus on the relevance of neural states unrelated to sensory stimulation, such as cortical activity during sleep and resting states, and we uncover a novel anterior-to-posterior pattern of human brain maturation. Based on our findings, bone age is a promising biomarker of adolescent maturity.

How do children learn to read in different countries? How do deficits in various components of the reading network affect learning outcomes? What are the consequences of such deficits in different languages? In this talk, I will present a full-blown developmentally plausible computational model of reading acquisition that has been implemented in English, French, Italian and German. The model can simulate individual learning trajectories and intervention outcomes on the basis of three component skills: orthography, phonology, and vocabulary. I will use the model to show how cross-language differences affect the learning-to-read process in different languages and to investigate to what extent similar deficits will produce similar or different manifestations of dyslexia in different languages.

The seminar will first outline the architecture of the human mind, specifying general and domain-specific mental processes. The place of causal reasoning and its relations with the other processes will be specified. Experimental, psychometric, developmental, and brain-based evidence will be summarized. The main message of the talk is that causal thought involves domain-specific core processes rooted in perception and served by special brain networks which capture interactions between objects. With development, causal reasoning is increasingly associated with a general abstraction system which generates general principles underlying inductive, analogical, and deductive reasoning and also heuristics for specifying causal relations. These associations are discussed in some detail. Possible implications for artificial intelligence and educational implications are also discussed.

Abstract relations are considered the pinnacle of human cognition, allowing analogical and logical reasoning, and possibly setting humans apart from other animal species. Such relations cannot be represented in a perceptual code but can easily be represented in a propositional language of thought, where relations between objects are represented by abstract discrete symbols. Focusing on the abstract relations same and different, I will show that (1) there is a discontinuity along ontogeny with respect to the representations of abstract relations, but (2) young infants already possess representations of same and different. Finally, (3) I will investigate the format of representation of abstract relations in young infants, arguing that those representations are not discrete, but rather built by juxtaposing abstract representations of entities.

I will begin by describing recent research taking a new, model-based approach to perceptual development. This approach uncovers fundamental changes in information processing underlying the protracted development of perception, action, and decision-making in childhood. For example, integration of multiple sensory estimates via reliability-weighted averaging – widely used by adults to improve perception – is often not seen until surprisingly late into childhood, as assessed by both behaviour and neural representations. This approach forms the basis for a newer question: the scope for the nervous system to deploy useful computations (e.g. reliability-weighted averaging) to optimise perception and action using newly-learned sensory signals provided by technology. Our initial model system is augmenting visual depth perception with devices translating distance into auditory or vibro-tactile signals. This problem has immediate applications to people with partial vision loss, but the broader question concerns our scope to use technology to tune in to any signal not available to our native biological receptors. I will describe initial progress on this problem, and our approach to operationalising what it might mean to adopt a new signal comparably to a native sense. This will include testing for its integration (weighted averaging) alongside the native senses, assessing the level at which this integration happens in the brain, and measuring the degree of ‘automaticity’ with which new signals are used, compared with native perception.

Concerns about the impact of social media use on adolescent well-being and mental health are common. While the amount of research in this area has increased rapidly over the last 5 years, most outputs are still marred by a multitude of limitations. These shortcomings have left our understanding of social media effects severely limited, holding back both scientific discovery and policy interventions. This talk discusses how developmental, cognitive and neuroscientific approaches might provide a new and improved way of studying social media effects. It will detail new studies in support of this idea, and raise potential avenues for collaborative work across the Cambridge Neuroscience community. As the digital world now (re)shapes what it means for us to live, communicate and develop, only an interdisciplinary approach will allow us to truly understand its impacts.

In a few months, human infants develop complex capacities in numerous cognitive domains. They learn their native language, recognize their parents, refine their numerical capacities and their perception of the world around them but are they conscious and how can we study consciousness when no verbal report is possible? One way to approach this question is to rely on the neural responses correlated with conscious perception in adults (i.e. a global increase of activity in notably frontal regions with top-down amplification of the sensory levels). We can thus study at what age the developing anatomical architecture might be mature enough to allow this type of responses, but moreover we can use similar experimental paradigms than in adults in which we expect to observe a similar pattern of functional responses.

During this talk, I will seek to reposition synaesthesia as model system for understanding variation in the construction of the human mind and brain. People with synaesthesia inhabit a remarkable mental world in which numbers can be coloured, words can have tastes, and music is a visual spectacle. Synaesthesia has now been documented for over two hundred years but key questions remain unanswered about why it exists, and what such conditions might mean for theories of the human mind. I will argue that we need to rethink synaesthesia as not just representing exceptional experiences, but as a product of an unusual neurodevelopmental cascade from genes to brain to cognition of which synaesthesia is only one outcome. Rather than synaesthesia being a kind of 'dangling qualia' (atypical experiences attached to a typical mind/brain) it should be thought of as unusual experiences that accompany an unusual mind/brain. Specifically, differences in the brains of synaesthetes support a distinctive way of thinking (enhanced memory, imagery etc.) and may also predispose towards particular clinical vulnerabilities. It is this neurodiverse phenotype that is an important object of study in its own right and may explain any adaptive value for having synaesthesia.

Adolescence is a period of life characterised by heightened sensitivity to social stimuli, an increased need for peer interaction and peer acceptance, and development of the social brain. Lockdown and social distancing measures intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 are reducing the opportunity to engage in face-to-face social interaction with peers. The consequences of social distancing on human social brain and social cognitive development are unknown, but animal research has shown that social deprivation and isolation have unique effects on brain and behaviour in adolescence compared with other stages of life. It is possible that social distancing might have a disproportionate effect on an age group for whom peer interaction is a vital aspect of development.

I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of new empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.