Peas or carrots: Evidence-based education programs targeting stress and attention

Reblogged from my post on NeuWriteSD.org:

I’m always keen to hear how scientists are able to reach out to their communities, whether it is by talking to young students about research opportunities, by tutoring or teaching, or by taking steps outside the lab to make direct links between research and the community. At this year’s meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), one of the invited symposia, entitled “The Broader Applicability of Insights from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience”, focused on some of great links between developmental neuroscience and the community. One talk by John Gabrieli, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, addressed the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES), elementary schools, standardized tests, and cognitive measures like IQ and processing speed [moral of the story: the elementary school you attend affects your standardized test scores, but not your IQ]. Here, I’ll focus on a talk by professor Helen Neville focused on how to train attention and reduce at-home stressors for kids coming from lower-SES backgrounds in order to buffer attentional skills from a young age. The moral of this story? Do all you can to create a stress-free, positive home environment, and give kids plenty of structured time to focus on tasks that require selective attention and suppression of distractions.

Read more on NeuWriteSD.org.

Antidepressants, plasticity, and language development

Reblogged from NeuWriteSD.org:

As an attendee at the 5th annual Society for Neurobiology (SNL) conference, four years had passed since my first exposure to the meeting–a discussion of the state-of-the-art research being done on the neuroscience of language processing. In those four years, things have happened! This meeting left me marveling at new advances and the number of presenters successfully using new technologies. Techniques of note included ECoG (electrocorticography) (1), TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) (2), and even pharmacological studies reaching down to the molecular level investigating speech perception of babies in utero (3).

Read more at NeuWriteSD.org.