Speaker: Professor Gaia Scerif, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Oxford University

Title: How does attention play a role in learning? Trajectories, mechanisms and risk factors

Host: Professor Sotaro Kita

Abstract:

Attentional control plays a crucial role in biasing incoming information in favour of what is relevant to influence further processing into learning and memory. Today I will focus on three complementary lines of evidence.

The first line of work was inspired by children at high genetic risk for attentional difficulties: how do attentional differences and emerging skills in the classroom develop for these children? This work highlights variable attentional skills in children at high genetic risk. The second line of work draws from work on atypical attention to study how individual differences in neurotypical preschoolers’ attentional control predict foundational early learning skills and their change over time. These findings highlight bidirectional relationships between attentional control skills, learning and memory. The final line of work will centre on children at high environmental risk for attentional difficulties, reporting on work with colleagues who study attentional control and early educational outcomes in low-income communities in North America and South Africa. These data suggest that individual differences in attentional control predict early learning, but that there may be unexpected buffering factors associated with better than expected outcomes, even under conditions of very high environmental risk.

As a whole, these findings point to the suggestion that attentional control processes are best understood not as developing in isolation, but rather as both influencing and influenced by development in other cognitive and social domains.

See archive of Previous speakers here

Email: Catherine Johnstone for a link