UCSD Cognitive Development Laboratory (CDL)

Very excited to announce new paper by amazing CDLab graduate student Lucas Chang, now viewable at Developmental Science: "Maternal discourse continuity and infants' actions organize 12-month-olds’ language exposure during object play"
DOI:10.1111/desc.12770

Maternal discourse continuity and infants’ actions organize 12‐month‐olds’ language exposure during object play - Chang - - Developmental Science - Wiley Online Library Developmental Science Volume 0, Issue ja Paper Maternal discourse continuity and infants’ actions organize 12‐month‐olds’ language exposure during object play Lucas M. Chang University of California, San DiegoSearch for more papers by this author Gedeon O. Deák Corresponding Author E-mail a...

Happy to announce a new paper with my amazing collaborator (and former Cog Dev Labber!) Cristine Legare, and her student collaborators Michael Dale and Sarah Kim.
TL/DR: age differences in children's rule-switching depend more on culture-specific experience than age difference in word-learning flexibility (which should be a culturally universal developmental task).

Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions Article

First fcMRI paper involving our lab - thanks to Shouhang Yin & Antou Chen for inviting me to collaborate. TL/DR: During rule-switching, left IFJ is the region most strongly co-activated with two brain networks commonly implicated in cognitive control (i.e., fronto-parietal and cingulo-opercular). This finding can resolve/confirm many related reports.

Coactivation of Cognitive Control Networks During Task Switching (PDF Download Available) Full-text (PDF) | Objective: The ability to flexibly switch between tasks is considered an important component of cognitive control that involves frontal and parietal cortical areas. The present study was designed to characterize network dynamics across multiple brain regions during task switchin...

New article preprint available in Infancy, with Anna Marika Jones (nee Krasno), Hector Jasso, and Jochen Triesch:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/infa.12204/full

What Leads To Shared Attention? Maternal Cues and Infant Responses During Object Play Attention sharing provides an important context for infant learning, but it is not fully understood how infants respond to parents’ isolated or combined actions to shift from nonsharing to attention‐sharing...

Talking to KPBS about brain dev & cognitive control: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/apr/20/what-learning-looks-art-and-science-classroom-tran/

What Learning Looks Like: The Art And Science Of Classroom Transitions When young children do not follow demands, it is not because they are ignoring you or choosing to misbehave. It is because they lack something called "cognitive flexibility."

Lucas' first first-authored paper is out! Congratulations Lucas and Kaya - great work!
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/87565641.2016.1274313

Contingencies Between Infants’ Gaze, Vocal, and Manual Actions and Mothers’ Object-Naming: Longitudinal Changes From 4 to 9 Months (2016). Contingencies Between Infants’ Gaze, Vocal, and Manual Actions and Mothers’ Object-Naming: Longitudinal Changes From 4 to 9 Months. Developmental Neuropsychology: Vol. 41, Special Issue on Neural and Developmental Mechanisms for Multisensory Communication in the Early Years, pp. 342-361.

Been neglecting this site, but good news this year (we really need some!)
- In June (or Sept. or Dec.) some great students graduated (well earned!) and moved on to exciting adventures: Megan-Rose Barron, Liz Cai, Dusten Conlon, Karishma D'Lima, Alissa Gutierrez, McKenna Williams, Sophia Su, Amanah Syed, Emma Sasson, Irene Tu, & Scotty Vincent...amazing students! They contributed so much to the lab and it was a real privilege to get to know them. Wish them tons of luck! Will be fun to get to see some of them at conferences as they continue as grad students.
- Kaya de Barbaro's paper, "Sensorimotor Decoupling Contributes to Triadic Attention: A Longitudinal Investigation of Mother–Infant–Object Interactions," co-authored by Chris Johnson, Deb Forster, and Gedeon, was published on-line (maybe also on that paper stuff we used to use) in Child Development.
- In September Julia Adrian joined the lab (yay!) as a 1st year grad student - it's been great having her on the team!
- PhD candidate Lucas Chang got a first-authored paper accepted for publication: "How Do Infants’ Actions Affect When Parents Name Objects?" will be published in Developmental Neuropsychology (probably 2017). First of many! :)
- This month we said goodbye to Alvin Li, who is joining the big world of big data. We'll miss you Alvin, but wish you well!

Concise, thought provoking summary of a complex ethical and research issue. Worth reading.

Where should US chimpanzees live? Understanding what research is, what it means, and how chimpanzees are cared for in captive settings matters to decisions, the animals, public interests, and preventing unintended consequences. Ong...

Good EEG practice session this morning! Thanks to veterans Alvin and Scotty for helping with training, and newer project members Sophia, Gabe, Megan-Rose, Dusten, and McKenna for jumping in and learning fast!

Academia.com's weekly update says that "1 visitor found your page by searching for "zulu learning around heideleberg."

Academia.com's search algorithm needs a little work.

Really exciting...

Octopus genome holds clues to uncanny intelligence DNA sequence expanded in areas otherwise reserved for vertebrates.