Risk avoidance in youth

Michael Crowley PhD
Yale Child Study Center

Thursday, April 27^th 2023
2:00 pm ET
In-person Oak Hall 408

Please register here.

Adolescence is a period of heightened risk-taking. Our field has focused heavily on understanding adolescent risk-taking behavior –yet, a sizeable proportion of adolescents may tend to avoid risks in some contexts. This talk will discuss ongoing programmatic research on risk avoidance in youth. Using computational modeling, high density EEG and fMRI, Dr. Crowley will discuss his current work examining the brain and behavior correlates of risk avoidance with links to substance use and anxiety.

The role of functional and structural brain imaging in educational neuroscience 

Michael Thomas DPhil
Director, Centre for Educational Neuroscience
Birkbeck, University of London

Thursday, March 30^th 2023
2:00 pm ET
Virtual talk on WebEx and YouTube Live

Recording

The field of educational neuroscience (or mind brain and education) was effectively launched by advances in in vivo brain imaging in the 1990s, driving the emergence of multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches to understanding mechanisms of learning. In this talk, I review how brain imaging is currently used and viewed in this inherently translational field. Approaches range from basic cognitive neuroscience of education-relevant abilities, to proposed diagnostic tools for neurodevelopmental conditions, to tests of cognitive models, to supporting construct validity, and to providing evidence for policy impact. These approaches are set in the context of contrasting views of educators to neuroscience (e.g., suspicion reflected in claims for the ‘seductive allure of neuroscience’; over-enthusiasm in the form of neuromyths; and resistance to reductionist accounts of learning). I will illustrate these arguments with examples from some of our work on developmental changes in intelligence, the brain basis of reading, and interventions to improve children’s learning of counter-intuitive concepts in math and science. 

A public cloud platform to support neuroimaging research in the era of big data

Franco Pestilli PhD
Department of Psychology
University of Texas, Austin

Friday, March 3^rd 2023
4:00 — 5:00 pm ET
In-person Oak Hall 408

Registration

Over the past years, the neuroimaging field has benefited tremendously from an influx in large-scale data collection and sharing efforts that have made it easier to study humans at the scale of populations.  Advances in large-scale data-driven methods also address the major scientific need for rigor and reproducibility. However, the use of large datasets poses multiple new challenges for researchers. Traditionally, neuroimaging researchers have collected a few hours of neuroimaging data on a few dozens of subjects and analyzed it using laboratory computers and in-house data processing methods. Modern studies, by contrast, require the analysis of hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of data, with an accompanying move of data away from individual laboratory computers toward high-performance computing clusters and cloud systems. To help ensure the reproducibility and rigor of scientific results, the neuroimaging community has developed public archives for data deposition, data standards, and software libraries for data preprocessing and analysis.  I will present a public resource, brainlife.io, which provides integrative web services to help piece together data, software, and hardware in support of simplicity, efficiency, transparency, and equity in big data neuroscience research. The vision of brainlife.io is to become a global interoperable and integrative platform connecting the multiple communities of software developers, hardware providers, and domain scientists via cloud services and technology to support the next generation of breakthroughs in neuroscience.

Bio:

Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Pestilli joined the University of Texas in 2020. Prior to that, he was Associate Professor at Indiana University. Dr. Pestilli holds a Ph.D. from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Rome La Sapienza and received Postdoctoral Training at Stanford University and Columbia University.

Dr. Pestilli is the author of over 60 publications spanning multiple fields of science, such as Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Vision, Neuroanatomy, Computer Science, and Neuroinformatics. Dr. Pestilli's scientific projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, the Association for Psychological Science, the Indiana University Emergent Areas of Research, Pervasive Technology Institute, and Microsoft Research.

Dr. Pestilli is elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Psychonomics Society and has received a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Achievements by the Association for Psychological Science as well as the Early Career Travel Award from the Japanese Neuroscience Society. He is an editorial board member for Scientific Data, and Scientific Reports. Dr. Pestilli is director of the Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network and founder and director of the open science platform brainlife.io.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Neuroscience and the Cognitive Science Program.

The brain's task control networks in youth and relations to academic performance

Jessica Church-Lang PhD
Department of Psychology
University of Texas at Austin

Thursday, February 2^nd 2023
2:00 pm ET
Oak Hall 408 (virtual) and livestream

Recording

Academic success directly relates to career success and future earnings, while task control, often assessed as executive function, predicts academic success. The Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience lab at UT Austin studies how the brain’s putative task control networks relate to academic success and mental health in children and adolescents over time. For this talk, I will first review some of our work on the consistency of control network engagement across different tasks in youth. I will then touch on some studies of individual differences in control-related brain activity among struggling and non-struggling readers, including research with middle school English language learners, conducted through our participation in the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities (TCLD; texasldcenter.org)

Building meaning builds teens’ brains: Adolescents’ transcendent thinking predicts young adult psychosocial outcomes via neural development

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD
Fahmy and Donna Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology
Director, USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education
Professor of Education, Psychology & Neuroscience
Brain & Creativity Institute, USC Rossier School of Education

Thursday, January 19^th 2023
2:00 pm ET
Oak Hall 408 (virtual) and livestream

Recording

A major achievement of adolescent development is the capacity to integrate abstract cognitive construals with affective experiences to construct meaningful, transcendent narratives about one’s self and the world—constructing identities and coming to feel strongly about complex social issues. Leveraging these capacities, adolescents can be among the most visionary and commited citizens, as the world has recently seen with such extraordinary youth as Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and Emma González. In this talk, I will discuss our longitudinal, neuropsychological studies of the processes underlying such capacities with Los Angeles-area adolescents and young adults from diverse backgrounds. Findings from qualitative interviews paired with neuroimaging reveal coordinated psychological, behavioral and neural processes by which youth transcend concrete, empathic reactions to also experience values-driven emotions reliant on abstract thought, such as moral inspiration, curiosity and compassion. They further reveal dispositions toward abstract construals in social contexts that predict subsequent brain development irrespective of IQ and socio-economic status, and in turn young adult relationships and wellbeing. Findings underscore the active role adolescents play in their own brain development through the meaning they make of the social world. In addition, especially as our intervention studies demonstrate that abstract construals increase over time in supportive developmental contexts and mediate increases in life purpose, the work has implications for redesigning secondary schools and out-of-school programming to promote youth thriving.   

Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence regarding the influence of oculomotor circuitry on auditory spatial tasks

Adrian KC Lee, ScD
Speech & Hearing Sciences
University of Washington

Thursday, November 17^th 2022
2:00 pm ET
Oak Hall 408 (virtual) and livestream

Watch the recording here.

Spatial cues play an important role in segregating auditory objects in a complex acoustical scene. Spatial attention is often considered to be supramodal, e.g., crossmodal spatial cues can enhance the perception of stimuli in another modality when presented in the same location. Therefore, it is not surprising to find similarities between auditory and visual spatial attentional networks. An outstanding question, however, is how the supramodal spatial attention network functions if the listener attends instead to non-spatial acoustic features, e.g., pitch? In vision, the coupling between oculomotor circuitry and the attentional network is well studied. Are there behavioral consequences related to this tight oculomotor coupling in the context of auditory spatial tasks? We addressed these questions using three approaches. First, in a series of neuroimaging experiments using combined magneto- and electro-encephalography constrained by anatomical MRI data, we explored how different cortical regions are recruited for auditory spatial and non-spatial attention both during maintenance of attention to a single auditory stream and switching of attention between streams. Second, based on our newly developed sparse-plus-low-rank graphical approach that enables modelling of structured relationships between time series in a big data setting, we are starting work inferring functional connectivity between cortical regions to tease apart how different cortical nodes are coordinated to perform different auditory attentional tasks. Finally, we used psychophysical methods to address whether there are behavioral consequences related to this tight coupling between the oculomotor and attentional networks in the context of auditory spatial tasks.

Leading Institutional Cultural Changes Using a Change Management Model: A DEI Example

Adrian KC Lee, ScD
Speech & Hearing Sciences
University of Washington

Thursday, November 3rd 2022
2:00  pm ET
Oak Hall 408 (virtual) and livestream

Instilling cultural changes in an institution is an uphill battle. Some take up leadership positions at an institution in the hope of making lasting changes. Crafting a vision of change is obviously important, but often the execution of changes is stalled because the road ahead is too daunting. While change management is a well-studied discipline in the business world, we barely leverage this in academia. In this talk, we will introduce one specific change management model and discuss how well-defined steps could help us lead effective change in the academic enterprise, using a change in DEI culture as an example.