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.

Sept. 22: Alison Miller Singley, "Relational Reasoning: Potential Implications for Mathematics Pedagogy"

Relational Reasoning: Potential Implications for Mathematics Pedagogy


The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics encourage reasoning about the relationships between math concepts. Relational reasoning is a skill that children develop and use spontaneously in non-mathematical contexts, but rarely do in math class. In particular, fractions and algebra are two major stumbling blocks for students, and both are highly relational in nature. Would engaging students' relational reasoning abilities help them to learn fractions and algebra? In this talk I'll discuss several ways in which I've approached this question and sketch out my plans for dissertation research.


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

Sept. 29: Kathryn Paige Harden, "Sensation Seeking and the Development of Externalizing Behaviors during Adolescence"

Sensation Seeking and the Development of Externalizing Behaviors during Adolescence

K. Paige Harden

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Psychology

Population Research Center

www.labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/

Externalizing behaviors, including substance use and delinquency, escalate during adolescence and are leading contributors to mortality and morbidity in this age group. This presentation will describe research on sensation seeking and its role in driving adolescent increases in externalizing. First, I will describe a series of studies on age-related changes in sensation seeking and impulse control. Results from nationally-representative samples show that (a) average levels of sensation seeking increase markedly from childhood to mid-adolescence, (b) sensation seeking peaks earlier and declines more rapidly for females than males, (c) changes in sensation seeking are largely independent from changes in impulse control, and (d) individual differences in sensation seeking change are under strong genetic control, and (e) adolescents who show more rapid increases in sensation seeking also show the most rapid escalation in delinquent behavior. Part 2 will describe results from a behavioral genetic study of twins from the Texas Twin Project (Harden, Tucker-Drob, & Tackett, 2013). Factor analytic results indicate that self-reports of sensation seeking map to some – but not all – laboratory tasks designed to assess risk-taking or reward seeking, but there is substantial task-specific variance in individual tests. Studies of sensation seeking should use a multivariate measurement battery that can isolate theoretically distinct constructs (i.e., sensation seeking from impulsivity from cognitive ability). Finally, Part 3 will present hypotheses and preliminary data regarding the influence of testosterone and other pubertal hormones on the development of sensation seeking, including evidence for possible testosterone × cortisol interactions.

Institute of Human Development & Change, Plasticity and Development Seminar, Fall 2014

All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman Hall, 12:15-1:30pm.

Sept. 22- Alison Miller Singley, Graduate Student
       UCB Department of Psychology

Sept. 29- Kathryn Paige Harden, Assistant Professor of Psychology
                University of Texas, Austin

Oct. 13- Kristen Hawkes, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
               University of Utah

Oct. 20- Nicholas Allen, Professor of Clinical Psychology
               University of Oregon

Oct. 27- Zi Lin Sim, Graduate Student
       UCB Department of Psychology

Nov. 3- Christoph Konieczny, Graduate Student of Psychology
             Heidelberg University

Nov. 10-Tamar Kushnir, Assistant Professor of Child Development
               Department of Human Development, Cornell University

Nov. 17- Larry Nucci, Professor UCB Graduate School of Education

Dec. 1-Fumiko Hoeft, Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & Director of Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience (LENS)
UCSF Department of Psychiatry

April 28: Jane Hu, "Learning from others using social and statistical cues"

Learning from others using social and statistical cues

How do children come to possess the knowledge necessary to progress into adulthood? With relatively few life experiences, children must look to other people for information about the world. In this talk, I'll discuss several studies that demonstrate children's rich ability to learn from and about others by observing their actions and paying attention to contextual cues surrounding new information. Specifically, I'll show that children can infer others' preferences from watching their choices, and consider consensus opinions and informants’ knowledge when learning new information from others.

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