The Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development turned 21! The research centre was born in 1998 at Birkbeck University, and has, since then, steadily contributed to foster our understanding of children’s development. More specifically, the CBCD focuses on the relation between postnatal brain development and changes in perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic abilities of typically and atypically developing children.

To celebrate the anniversary, a two-days event was held at the Mary Ward House on the 15th and 16th of November. Forty speakers presented their research. The multidisciplinary approach of the CBCD could not be more salient. Studies used a broad variety of methods, including Electroencephalography, Near Infrared Spectroscopy, genetic analyses, or eye-tracking. Multiple areas of knowledge were covered, such as the development of body awareness and goal-directed actions, the organisation and reorganisation of brain networks during language development, or the development of attention and interpersonal communication in typically developing children and in children with autism. Over 15 000 babies and their families came to the Centre, making all these advances possible.

The anniversary was also the opportunity to celebrate the international outreach of the Centre, collaborations being carried out with multiple European countries, the USA, Gambia and India. This is not to forget the diversity of the 125 doctoral students and 65 postdocs who have been trained at the Centre, and who will carry their legacy across the world.

o The program below will give you an overview of the range of speakers and themes that were addressed at the anniversary.

o You can also read Annie Brookman-Byrne’s report about the anniversary, published in the Psychologist. It is full of anecdotes and fun facts about the CBCD. 

Program

The Centre for Educational Neuroscience had the pleasure to receive Dr. Stuart Ritchie for a talk on polygenic scores, and their association with cognitive traits.

Using polygenic scores to predict cognitive traits?
In this video, @StuartJRitchie discusses some caveats.@KingsCollegeLon pic.twitter.com/YrHhFHiiUM

— CEN (@UoL_CEN) November 15, 2019

You can find Stuart’s most recent publications here, and follow him on Twitter @StuartJRitchie

We are all individuals, but we acknowledge that we might have inherited grandma’s nose or dad’s extrovert personality. Have you ever thought about what physical and psychological traits, we humans as a species, have inherited from our ancestors?

These are key questions addressed by the “Me, Human” project lead by Dr Gillian Forrester. As she tells it: “As a child, I was fascinated by our closest living relatives – the great apes. I wondered – what do gorillas and chimps think? How similar is their experience of life to mine? I scratched this itch by watching documentaries, reading books and eventually taking degrees in San Diego and Oxford. It was during my studies that I started to learn about brains and how they control behaviour. What struck me as truly incredible was that there are parts of the human brain that come from when humans and fish shared a common ancestor – over 500 million years ago!”

As humans, we are able to think and act in ways unlike any other animal on the planet. Because of these unique capabilities, it is easy to forget that modern human abilities have their origins in a shared evolutionary history. Although we are bipedal and comparatively hairless, we are indeed great apes. In fact, we are not even on the fringes of the great ape family tree – we are genetically closer to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. As such, we share many brain and behaviour traits with our great ape cousins. But, our similarities to other animals date back much farther than our split with an ancestor common to both humans and great apes (approximately 6 million years ago). Some brain and behaviour traits date back over 500 million years –present in early vertebrates and remain preserved in modern humans. It is our similarities and differences to other species that allow us to better understand how we came to be modern humans.

One of our oldest inherited traits is the ‘divided brain’. While our left and right halves of the brain (hemispheres) appear physically similar, they are in charge of different behaviours. Animal studies have highlighted that fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals also possess left and right hemispheres that differentially control certain behaviours. The divided behaviours of these animals provide a window into our ancestral past, telling the story of our shared evolutionary history with early vertebrates.

Studies suggest that the right hemisphere emerged with a specialisation for recognising threat in the environment and controlling escape behaviours and the left hemisphere emerged as dominant for producing motor action sequences for feeding. The divided brain allows for any organism to obtain nourishment whilst keeping alert for predators. We can think of the brain as acting like an ‘eat and not be eaten’ parallel processor.

Considering the consistency in brain side across different animal species, it seems likely that there has been a preservation of these characteristics through evolutionary time. Effectively, we have lugged our useful brain and behavioural traits with us throughout our evolutionary journey. However, little is known about how these old brain traits support modern human behaviours like the way we navigate social environments, kiss, embrace, nurture babies and take a selfie! – inhibiting a better understanding of how, when and why our human unique capabilities emerged and also how they still develop during human infancy and childhood.

In order to answer these questions, scientists from Birkbeck, University of London and collaborating institutions ran the Me, Human live scientific experiment at the Science Museum this summer. This multidisciplinary team of scientists at all levels of their careers from undergraduate students in psychology and biological anthropology to senior academics at leading London universities invited over 1,700 visitors to take part, using their eyes, ears and hands to find out how their ancient brain was influencing their behaviour.

Participants learnt about cutting-edge research and engaged with fun psychology experiments from solving puzzle boards, testing their grip strength and holding and manipulating surprise objects!  Individuals would watch their brain in action, using portable brain-imaging technology as well as put on our magic headphones to test how their brains processed speech.

All this data will shed light on how we, as humans, share a common evolutionary history with other animals – revealing our extraordinary connection to the natural world.

* Note that the specialisations of the left and right hemispheres are presented here within the context of evolution. As explain on our resource “How the Brain Works”: it does not mean that people differ in how much they favour using their ‘left brain’ or their ‘right brain’ and that this produces different cognitive styles and personalities. That’s a brain myth.

In this short video, Dr. Julia Hofweber gives an overview of her talk about “The effects of code-switching on bilinguals’ executive functions”.

Have you ever found yourself mixing words from different languages in a sentence? Well, this can be associated with better performance at cognitive control tasks. In this video, Dr. Julia Hofweber gives a snapshot of her former PhD research at @UniofReading.@IOE_London @UCLPALS pic.twitter.com/SvjYi0DCDH

— CEN (@UoL_CEN) November 3, 2019

Julia carried out this work during her PhD program at the University of Reading. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at UCL, investigating implicit learning in the context of sign language acquisition with Chloe Marshall.

You can find her publications here.

For more information, grab a cup of coffee / tea and visit “How the Brain Works“.

Megan Sumeracki is an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island College, and the co-founder of the Learning Scientists. Since its creation in 2016, the collaborative group has become a key reference in EdNeuro, broadcasting various resources to better understand learning processes and learning strategies (e.g. podcasts, blog posts, videos). In this blog written for the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, Megan tells us a bit more about the birth of the Learning Scientists, and about her ongoing projects.

Creating The Learning Scientists

In January 2016, I was trying out a new assignment integrating social media into one of my classes. I wanted to teach my students about science communication, particularly how research can be applied in “real life.” I was also thinking a lot about the research I was doing and whether it would ever have an impact. At the same time, Yana Weinstein was having similar thoughts, and we very organically started a Twitter account called @AceThatTest designed to help students find effective study strategies. The account turned into our website, learningscientists.org, and the resources grew organically. We realized quickly that the best way to have an impact on education was to focus on bidirectional communication with teachers, and in that way indirectly help the students. As the project has grown, we have had the opportunity to talk with a lot of teachers around the world about science of learning research, and are always learning from teachers about what research questions would best serve education.

Collaborating with the Learning Agency

As a part of my work with the Learning Scientists, we were thinking about ways to create more free resources aimed at how to implement effective learning strategies in classrooms, and we wanted to focus on how the strategies might be applied in specific content areas. Ulrich Boser, the founder of the Learning Agency, was thinking along the same lines. Our Program Officer at Overdeck, Sarah Johnson, suggested we connect and work together. The project was called “The Science of Learning in Practice”, and involved pairing researchers and teachers to implement evidence-based learning strategies into the classroom. Videos were created to showcase these partnerships; these videos now serve as long-term resources for educators and researchers interested in educational neuroscience. The Learning Agency applied for the grant officially, and I served as a consultant on the grant working on two of the videos. These videos were about dual coding and interleaving practice.

This project was particularly relevant for my research. One focus of my program of research is how we can teach students to effectively utilize learning strategies to improve overall academic success. In this project with the Learning Agency, I was able to work together with teachers to figure out ways to implement science of learning strategies into their classrooms, making it a good fit for me.

I learned a lot throughout this process, and it has had an influence on the way I talk about the strategies with other teachers and my own students. In this blog, I talk about some of the things that I learned and note how truly rewarding it was to work with the two teams of teachers. You can read more about my work with the dual coding team in Memphis here.

You can follow Megan and the Learning Scientists on Twitter @DrSumeracki and @AceThatTest.