Dec. 1: Fumiko Hoeft, "Parenting Influences on Developmental Processes: Insights from Intergerational Imaging of Human Brain Networks"

Parenting Influences on Developmental Processes:  Insights from Intergenerational Imaging of Human Brain Networks      

Parents have large influences on their offspring's development in complex ways that include genetic and pre-, peri- and post-natal environmental influences, as well as interactions across these levels of influence on a variety of developmental processes. My lab is taking an innovative approach to investigating some aspects of these complexities through intergenerational neuroimaging.  The intergenerational multiple deficit model affords integration of these influences as well as others, whether parental or non-parental, genetic or environmental, and risk or protective, to explain individual variability in complex traits.  Further, it has recently been suggested that most complex traits show intergenerational sex-specific transmission patterns.  Because macrocircuits include heterogeneous components with complex interaction among components, they may be ideal targets for investigations, where key factors/causes may converge in ways that lead to complex phenotypes.

My talk will center around these notions, and I will discuss our current research examining how parental cognitive and neuroimaging patterns are associated with offspring's complex traits and related imaging patterns, taking reading (dis)ability as an example.  We first establish the feasibility of this novel approach, intergenerational imaging, by confirming maternal transmission patterns in the cortico-limbic system related to emotion regulation, something that is well established in gene expression and behavioral studies of animals and humans. We then interrogate network patterns related to reading, and show strong intergenerational transmission patterns. We discuss these preliminary findings in light of historical etiological theories of reading disability (dyslexia; e.g. testosterone theory).  We also introduce our new research program that will allow us to dissociate prenatal influence from genetic and postnatal influence, which has traditionally not been feasible in humans, but is critically important in dissecting the neurobiological mechanisms underlying complex traits.

 

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:00-1:30pm. 

Nov. 17: Larry Nucci, "Integrating Moral Development Within the Teaching of History in Urban Schools"

Integrating Moral Development Within the Teaching of History in Urban Schools

 

This talk will describe a successful effort to apply developmental principles to promote moral development within the teaching of the regular social studies curriculum in Oakland public middle schools.  The talk will conclude with a discussion of current efforts to extend this work throughout the district, and to integrate this approach with the district efforts to promote civic engagement at the high school level.  Our approach enabled teachers to differentially address students’ understandings of societal conventions and social systems, and their moral reasoning.  Teachers reduced their reliance on didactic instruction, and promoted students’ engagement in transactive forms of discourse within peer and whole class discussions.  Students’ transactive discussion was in turn associated with the increases in students’ moral growth and their spontaneous coordination of moral and conventional elements in multi-faceted contexts.  Student engagement within their academic learning increased along with their perceptions of the amount of history learned.  Teachers reported increased levels of student engagement, and enthusiastically endorsed the approach taken in this project. 

This talk will be held from 12:00-1:30pm in 3105 Tolman Hall.