Browsing by Subject "developmental psychology"

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    Resting-state and task functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of early language development in temporal and frontal lobe
    (2024-05) Day, Trevor
    Language is a critically important cognitive skill that enables both higher-order cognition andinteraction between individuals. Children face a daunting task of acquiring their first language through passive input, a task they do remarkably well in only a few short years. Linguistic processing is known to be lateralized to the left hemisphere in the majority of the population. The exact mechanism by which this lateralization emerges is not fully understood. In this dissertation, I use functional neuroimaging to evaluate the changing laterality of the language network, focused on two nodes. Those two nodes are the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is implicated in syntactic processing, and middle temporal gyrus (MTG), which is implicated in semantic processing, with the goal of understanding how the language network emerges. I use two groups of participants and techniques. I applied resting-state functional neuroimaging to a large accelerated longitudinal imaging study of infants and toddlers aged 8 mo to 30 mo. Secondly, I used both resting-state and task imaging to investigate an n = 4 subset of that study who returned for densely sampled imaging visits between 4.5 y and 6.5 y. These analyses show that laterality related to MTG, but not IFG, increase between 8 mo to 30 mo. These findings are consistent with other work in this domain that suggests IFG does not assume its adult-like role until 9 y or older. Furthermore, task studies in the older population show that IFG remains uninvolved in the language network at those ages, yet IFG participates in the ventral attention network (VAN) (and IFG-related laterality increases between 2.5 y and 4.5 y, despite this). These results suggest that the language network co-opts the VAN to accelerate processing in left hemisphere (LH).
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    The Role of Social Media and Mindfulness in Adolescents’ Divided Attention
    (2024-04-30) Haig, Michaela; Martin, Timothy; Zelazo, Philip
    In this study, we examine the potential effects of a short mindfulness intervention on divided attention in adolescents. Recently, social media has been demanding increasing amounts of divided attention among its users. Understanding how to mediate these impacts is vital to helping today’s adolescents successfully retain attentive capabilities. We recruited middle and high school students at a local charter school to participate. Students were given a 5-minute open monitoring, focused attention, or control listening exercise. Then, we administered a measure of divided attention created for this study. In this, participants watched a 2-minute dual-stream video and were instructed to either pay attention to the video on the left only (and not get distracted by the other video) or to watch both videos simultaneously (divide their attention). Then, participants answered a series of questions about both videos to measure their information retention. We found no significant effects of mindfulness on divided attention, nor support for the efficacy of the divided attention measure. Future directions are discussed.