7 March 2025 - 7 March 2025
1:00PM - 2:00PM
L68 Psychology building, or online via Zoom
Free
This talk is part of the Department of Psychology seminar series.
There is a wealth of evidence on the role of caregiver input on behavioural characteristics of infant attention, cognition and socio-emotional wellbeing. There is, however, limited evidence on underlying brain function, and brain-behaviour links. These underpinnings are important to understand to shed light on mechanisms in preverbal infants who cannot be successfully engaged in multiple experiments with differing conditions, to establish continuity with lifespan research, and to contribute towards better characterizing individual differences. I will explore these caregiver-infant brain-behaviour links through three studies on the same population. In the first study, I will investigate whether caregiver visual working memory is linked to infant visual working memory, at the level of behaviour and brain function, using similar preferential looking tasks. In the second study, I will examine spatio-functional brain correlates of joint attention in caregivers and infants, and continued attention in infants during dyadic interactions. In the third study, I investigate whether interbrain synchrony between caregivers and infants is linked to caregiver scaffolding, and infant object engagement.
Assistant Professor, University of Nottingham
Dr Sobana Wijeakumar's research focusses on cognitive development, particularly executive functions, in the first five years of life and contextual influences such as caregiver involvement, home environment, socioeconomic status, schooling and cross-cultural differences. Her research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and published in Nature Human Behaviour, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Imaging Neuroscience, NeuroImage etc.