Search

Measuring the neural correlates of cognition in freely moving preschoolers presents several challenges. The current article describes a proof-of-principle study assessing brain activation in preschoolers while performing a naturalistic action planning task in the wild. Ninety-two children between 3 and 5 years of age built both a Duplo house and a Duplo spaceship. Both building tasks involve the completion of multiple subgoals within the overall goal. The results revealed an increase in oxyhaemoglobin activation in right DLPFC when planning for the next subgoal, as well as in a standard go/no-go inhibition task, suggesting that inhibition may play a special role in selecting subgoals at these ages. More generally, we demonstrate that fNIRS data can be recorded from moving preschoolers and that a multi-modal set-up including optical motion capture can allow the reconstruction of events of interest. Implications of the approach, as well as recommendations to improve data quality of wireless fNIRS in freely moving toddlers, are discussed.

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, and people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared primary school children's performance at three academic tasks (text recall, reading comprehension, mathematics) in silence, and while hearing irrelevant verbal noise (storytelling, n = 33) or mixed noise (outdoor noise, movement, babble, n = 31). We found that noise does not impair overall performance. Children might use compensatory strategies (e.g., re-reading) to reach the same level of performance in silence and noise. Individual differences in selective attention and working memory were not related to the impact of noise, with one exception: children with lower working memory were more impaired by noise when doing mathematics. Replication on a larger sample is needed.

The joint recruitment of two systems (habitual and goal-directed) for the control of behaviour has provoked wide interestin the last decades. The systems relative contributions have been quantified through a standard two-stage task and byapplying reinforcement learning (model-free/model-based), but less is known about the processes behind their integration.We address this with an interactive activation model of the standard task in which the two systems activate, to varyingdegrees, the potential responses. The model is able to capture the behavioural patterns characterizing the trade-off betweenthe two systems. Additionally, the model is able to simulate response times because activations vary over time within atrial. We explore three mechanistic hypotheses of the trade-off related to developmental data from childhood to adulthood.We argue that process-level models such as ours are needed, conjointly with new empirical tasks, to further understandchanges in the control of action selection across development.

Moving the field of Mind, Brain, and Education forward requires researchers and educators to reframe the boundaries of their own discipline in order to create knowledge that is both scientifically based, and of practical relevance for education. We believe that this could be done by co-constructing research projects "from the start." We present a case study of a noise-reduction intervention in elementary classrooms, in which teachers and researchers worked together from the onset of study design. We examine the processes behind: (1) selecting research questions and measures, (2) planning interventions, (3) receiving ethical approval and funding, (4) recruiting schools, and (5) collecting data. At each step, our study provides suggestions for future collaborative efforts, keeping in mind broader theoretical and methodological implications. We believe that our concrete examples and suggestions will be useful for beginning and confirmed researchers, as well as teachers aiming to know more about research projects.

Benefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children's learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged 6 to 10 years (N = 180) participated in a novel tabletop category-learning paradigm with visual, haptic, or visuohaptic informative cues. The results indicated that combinations of complimentary visual and haptic cues facilitated learning above unisensory visual cues only in 8-year-old children. Primarily, however, haptic information was found to dominate children's category learning across ages, particularly in the youngest children (6-year-olds), even with equal discriminability of haptic and visual exemplars. These findings suggest developmental changes in the ability to effectively combine unrelated visual and haptic information for categorical learning. Implications for the use of nonpertinent visuohaptic cues in learning tasks within educational settings at different ages, and in particular the dominance of haptic stimuli for children's learning, are discussed.

The current study investigates whether informative, mutually redundant audiovisual cues support better performance in a category learning paradigm. Research suggests that, under some conditions, redundant multisensory cues supports better learning, when compared with unisensory cues. This was examined systematically across two experiments. In Experiment 1, children aged 5, 7, and 10 years were allocated to 1 of the 3 "modality" conditions ("audio informative only," "visual informative only," and "audiovisual informative") and explicitly instructed to learn the category membership of individual exemplars, as determined by a threshold of correct responses. Unisensory or redundant multisensory cues determined category membership, depending on the learning condition. In addition to significant main effects of age group and condition, a significant interaction between age and sensory condition was found, with 5-year-olds performing better when presented with redundant multisensory cues compared to unisensory cues. Ten-year-olds performed better with auditory informative only cues, compared to visual informative only cues, or informative but redundant multisensory cues, with no significant difference between the latter two. In Experiment 2, the multisensory condition was presented to separate groups of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds, examining explicit learning outcomes in the "audiovisual informative" condition. Results showed that children who reached threshold during training were faster, made fewer errors, and performed better during test trials. Learning appeared to be based on the visual informative cues. Findings are discussed in the context of age-related selective attention, suggesting that the value of providing multisensory informative cues to support real-world learning depends on age and instructional context.

The Cone of Direct Gaze (CoD) is described as the range ofeye gaze deviations over which an observer reports gaze asbeing directed towards them. The CoD has been found tonarrow with age across childhood (Mareschal et al. 2016). Weinvestigated whether reinforcement learning, so critical inshaping eye gaze responses in infancy, was able to accountfor the emergence of a CoD and its narrowing in childhood.To this end, we adapted Triesch et al.'s (2006) reinforcementlearning model by (1) defining a topology over objectlocations, and (2) introducing opponent non-linear rewardprofiles for looking at objects and caregivers. In Simulation 1we show that these modifications give rise to a functionalCoD in which there is reduced eye gaze following andincreased fixation on the caregiver for locations with a smallcaregiver eye gaze eccentricity. In Simulation 2 we show thatthe width of this effect reduces with learning, suggesting thatdevelopmental decreases in the CoD may be driven byreinforcement learning. In Simulation 3 we explore howchanges in model parameters can explain the CoD in highanxiety populations. Finally, the model provides one way ofunifying the developmental gaze-following and CoDliteratures, until now considered largely independent.

Even newborn infants are able to extract structure from astream of sensory inputs and yet, how this is achieved remainslargely a mystery. We present a connectionist autoencodermodel, TRACX2, that learns to extract sequence structure bygradually constructing chunks, storing these chunks in adistributed manner across its synaptic weights, andrecognizing these chunks when they re-occur in the inputstream. Chunks are graded rather than all-or-none in nature.As chunks are learned their component parts become moreand more tightly bound together. TRACX2 successfullymodels the data from four experiments from the infant visualstatistical-learning literature, including tasks involving low-salience embedded chunk items, part-sequences, and illusoryitems. The model also captures performance differencesacross ages through the tuning of a single learning rateparameter. These results suggest that infant statistical learningis underpinned by the same domain general learningmechanism that operates in auditory statistical learning and,potentially, in adult artificial grammar learning.1

Relational reasoning, the ability to detect meaningful patterns, matures through adolescence. The unique contributions of verbal analogical and nonverbal matrix relational reasoning to science and maths are not well understood. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected during science and maths problem-solving, and participants (N = 36, 11-15 years) also completed relational reasoning and executive function tasks. Higher verbal analogical reasoning associated with higher accuracy and faster reaction times in science and maths, and higher activation in the left anterior temporal cortex during maths problem-solving. Higher nonverbal matrix reasoning associated with higher science accuracy, higher science activation in regions across the brain, and lower maths activation in the right middle temporal gyrus. Science associations mostly remained significant when individual differences in executive functions and verbal IQ were taken into account, while maths associations typically did not. The findings indicate the potential importance of supporting relational reasoning in adolescent science and maths learning.

Multisensory tools are commonly employed within educational settings (e.g. Carter & Stephenson, 2012), and there is a growing body of literature advocating the benefits of presenting children with multisensory information over unisensory cues for learning (Baker & Jordan, 2015; Jordan & Baker, 2011). This is even the case when the informative cues are only arbitrarily related (Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, 2017). However, the delayed retention of learning following exposure to multisensory compared to unisensory cues has not been evaluated, and has important implications for the utility of multisensory educational tools. This study examined the retention of incidental categorical learning in 5-, 7- and 9-year-olds (N = 181) using either unisensory or multisensory cues. Results found significantly greater retention of learning following multisensory cue exposure than with unisensory information when category knowledge was tested following a 24-hour period of delay. No age-related changes were found, suggesting that multisensory information can facilitate the retention of learning across this age range.

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty-one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual-only, auditory-only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good abilities to access goals at the lowest level of the representational hierarchy. However, only 5-year-olds consistently aligned their response choices with goals at superordinate levels. These findings suggest that the ability to maintain top-down control and adjust behavioural responses according to goals at multiple levels of abstraction undergoes a marked improvement throughout the preschool period. Results are discussed in relation to current accounts of cognitive control and the monitoring of conflict in sequential action.

Adults' judgments of another person's gaze reflect both sensory (e.g., perceptual) and nonsensory (e.g., decisional) processes. We examined how children's performance on a gaze categorization task develops over time by varying uncertainty in the stimulus presented to 6- to 11 year-olds (n = 57). We found that younger children responded "direct" over a wider range of gaze deviations. We also found that increasing uncertainty led to an increase in direct responses, across all age groups. A simple model to account for these data revealed that although younger children had a noisier sensory representation of the stimulus, most developmental changes in gaze were because of a change in children's response criteria (category boundaries). These results suggest that although the core mechanisms for gaze processing are already in place by the age of 6, their development continues across the whole of childhood.