March 9: Candice Odgers

Income Inequality and the Developing Child

Low-income children growing up in economically mixed neighborhoods are expected to benefit from higher quality schools, more prosocial peer groups and greater access to amenities and opportunities. Contrary to this belief, new research from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study finds that low-income children fare worse when they grow up in the ‘shadow of wealth’ as compared to their low-income peers living in concentrated poverty. The importance of examining both local area poverty and inequality on children’s behavior is highlighted, alongside a description of new methods for capturing neighborhood and momentary effects in studies of child development.

Brief Bio: Candice Odgers is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Neuroscience and Associate Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia and completed her postdoctoral training at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre in London, England. Her research focuses on how social inequalities and early adversity influence children’s future health and well-being, with an emphasis on how new technologies, including mobile phones and web-based tools, can be used to understand and improve the lives of young people. Odgers was a William T. Grant Scholar and the recipient of early career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development and the Royal Society of Canada. Most recently, she received the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science for transformative early career contributions to psychological science. More information about her current work can be found on the following website: adaptlab.org

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

Feb. 23: Mark Seidenberg

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications
Research in cognitive science, developmental science, and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I will mainly focus on the United States, where the reading levels of about 25-30% of the population are low by standard metrics, with an eye on comparisons to other countries. I will consider three possible contributing factors: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the US by the Black-White “achievement gap”. I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

BIO:
Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has conducted research on many topics related to reading and language since the disco era. His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His current research focuses on the causes of chronically low reading performance among poor and minority children, particularly the effects of language background on learning to read. He is among the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book Reading Matters will be published by Basic Books (late 2015).

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

Feb. 9: Tamar Kushnir

Meeting in the middle: acting and learning in social environments

In the course of a typical day, an individual child will encounter a range of social situations, all of which afford the opportunity to learn.   Patient, caring adults may be engaged with them in conversation or direct instruction. Playful groups of peers may attract their attention to interesting new objects or games.  Even when they are on their own, they may be exploring classrooms prepared intentionally by adults to facilitate their learning.

How do children learn in and from this changing social world? One idea is that children meet their social environments “in the middle”:  The more the social environment is one of direct pedagogy, the more a child has to rely upon her emerging theory of mind to learn. Conversely, the more the environment consists of social resources not directed at the child but nonetheless available to her, the more active she will be in gathering social information. This implies a need for a broader definition of social cognition, one that includes mental state inferences, active social engagement, and everything in between.

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

Feb. 2: Nim Tottenham

 Human Amygdala-Prefrontal Cortex Development and the Role of Caregiving

Abstract: 
Strong evidence indicates that reciprocal connections between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) support fundamental aspects of emotional behavior in adulthood. Despite the central role that this circuitry plays in regulating emotions in adulthood, the state of the science regarding the development of this circuitry in humans is at an early stage. In this talk, I will present developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging data describing age-related changes in amygdala-mPFC circuitry throughout childhood and adolescence and how it relates to emergent emotional behaviors. The argument will be made that the development of this circuitry in humans is intimately associated with caregiving, such that parents exert a significant buffering effect during childhood.  I will focus on both typical development as well as development following maternal deprivation (e.g., orphanage care), showing that early life stress may accelerate development of this circuitry. The findings presented are highly consistent with the animal literature showing both large changes in amygdala-mPFC circuitry throughout childhood/adolescence, as well as the large influence of maternal care in shaping this neural circuitry. These age-related changes will be discussed in terms of potential developmental sensitive periods for environmental influence.


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

Institute of Human Development & Change, Plasticity, and Development Seminar, Spring 2015

Feb.2- Nim Tottenham, Professor of Psychology
           Columbia University
           Human Amygdala-Prefrontal Cortex Development and the Role of  
           Caregiving



Feb.9-  Tamar Kushnir, Professor of Human Development
            Cornell University
            Meeting in the middle: acting and learning in social
            environments



Feb. 23- Mark Seidenberg, Professor of Psychology
               University of Wisconsin, Madison
           



March 9-  Candice Odgers, Professor of Public Policy, Psychology & Neuroscience  Duke University



March 16- Shaun O'Grady & Katie Kimura, Graduate Students
                  UCB Department of Psychology



April 6-  Michael Lewis, Professor Pediatrics & Psychiatry
                Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
                The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of
               Emotional Life



April 13-  Adrienne Wente & Ruthe Foushee, Graduate Students
                 UCB Department of Psychology



April 20-  Minxuan He, Graduate Student
                UCB Department of Psychology



April 27-  Caren Walker, Graduate Student
                UCB Department of Psychology



May 4-  Andrea Urqueta, Graduate Student
             UCB Department of Psychology

All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

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.