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.

Recent insights from auditory neuroscience provide a new perspective on how the brain encodes speech. Using these recent insights, I will provide an overview of key factors underpinning individual differences in children’s development of language and phonology, providing a context for exploring atypical reading development (dyslexia). Children with dyslexia are relatively insensitive to acoustic cues related to speech rhythm patterns. This lack of rhythmic sensitivity is related to the atypical neural encoding of rhythm patterns in speech by the brain. I will describe our recent data from infants as well as children, demonstrating developmental continuity in the key neural variables.

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.

Studies show that abuse, neglect or trauma during childhood can lead to lifelong struggles including with mental health. Fortunately research also indicates that solutions and interventions at various stages of life can be developed to help. But even among people who remain resilient or do not experience acute stresses, a lack of opportunity early in life due to poverty or systemic racism can still constrain their ability to realize their full potential. In what ways are health and other outcomes affected by early life difficulty? What can individuals and institutions do to enhance opportunity?" "This daylong event will feature talks by neuroscientists, policy experts, physicians, educators and activists as they discuss how our experiences and biology work together to affect how our minds develop and what can be accomplished in helping people overcome early disadvantages.

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent and disabling condition that affects larger numbers of children and adolescents worldwide. Until recently, we have understood little about the nature of PTSD reactions in our youngest children (aged under 8 years old). This talk describes our work over the last 15 years working with this very young age group. It overviews how we need a markedly different PTSD diagnosis for very young children, data on the prevalence of this new diagnostic algorithm, and the development of a psychological intervention and its evaluation in a clinical trial.

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.

SES neuroscience, using imaging and other methods, has revealed generalizations of interest for population neuroscience and the study of individual differences. But beyond its scientific interest, SES is a topic of societal importance. Does neuroscience offer any useful insights for promoting socioeconomic justice and reducing the harms of poverty? In this talk I will use research from my own lab and others’ to argue that SES neuroscience has the potential to contribute to policy in this area, although its application is premature at present. I will also attempt to forecast the ways in which practical solutions to the problems of poverty may emerge from SES neuroscience. Bio: Martha Farah has conducted groundbreaking research on face and object recognition, visual attention, mental imagery, and semantic memory and - in more recent times - has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary research into neuroscience and society. This deals with topics such as using fMRI for lie detection, ethics of cognitive enhancement, and effects of social deprivation on brain development.

Executive control processes and flexible behaviors rely on the integrity of, and dynamic interactions between, large-scale functional brain networks. The right insular cortex is a critical component of a salience/midcingulo-insular network that is thought to mediate interactions between brain networks involved in externally oriented (central executive/lateral frontoparietal network) and internally oriented (default mode/medial frontoparietal network) processes. How these brain systems reconfigure with development is a critical question for cognitive neuroscience, with implications for neurodevelopmental pathologies affecting brain connectivity. I will describe studies examining how brain network dynamics support flexible behaviors in typical and atypical development, presenting evidence suggesting a unique role for the dorsal anterior insular from studies of meta-analytic connectivity modeling, dynamic functional connectivity, and structural connectivity. These findings from adults, typically developing children, and children with autism suggest that structural and functional maturation of insular pathways is a critical component of the process by which human brain networks mature to support complex, flexible cognitive processes throughout the lifespan.

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.