Keynotespeakers
Denis Mareschal
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birbeck College, London
Preliminary Title: The challenges and rewards of pursuing real-word developmental science
Denis Mareschal is Professor, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, and Deputy Head of the Department of Psychological Science at Birkbeck, University of London. His research focuses on perceptual and cognitive development in infants and children, combining computational modeling with empirical studies. The aim of his research is to understand the interaction between the properties of a learning system and the environment in order to explain the observed developmental trajectories of infants and children.
He is a member of the Association of Psychological Sciences (USA) and the British Psychological Society (UK). His research has been recognised with the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, now known as the Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship, and the Margaret Donaldson Early Career Prize of the British Psychological Society.
In addition to numerous conference presentations and the publication of many research articles, he is the (co-)author of books on neuroconstructivism, educational neuroscience, and concept development.
Brigitte Röder
Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg
Title: Neural evidence for sleeper effects in human brain development
Brigitte Röder is a Professor of Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on neural plasticity, multisensory integration, and learning processes in the brain. She investigates how the brain adapts to new sensory and cognitive challenges during development and the mechanisms of plasticity involved. A key focus of her work is crossmodal processing and the reorganization of the brain in cases of sensory deprivation, such as blindness.
For her outstanding research, Brigitte Röder has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Her work has significant implications for the development of educational and rehabilitation programs.
Brigitte Röder has given numerous international keynotes and invited talks and is recognized as a leading expert in the fields of neuroplasticity and multisensory processing. Her research significantly contributes to understanding the brain’s capacity for learning and has a major impact on both theoretical and applied sciences.
- Abstract:
Maurer et al. (2007) proposed the concept of “sleeper effects” in human brain development. The basic idea of this concept is that altered early experience, such as visual deprivation, affects the emergence of functions that typically unfold later in development, that is, long after the end of the altered experience (visual deprivation). Maurer et al. (2007) speculated that sleeper effects are either due to an impaired development of neural circuits that are would crucially contribute to the later developing function. Alternatively, sleeper effects might arise from an interruption of the orchestrated development of multiple neural circuits.
In this talk I will discuss recent findings from humans who were born blind and recovered vision only later in childhood. I will provide neural evidence for sleeper effects and their mechanisms, which I will try to relate to those postulated by Maurer et al. (2007).
Maurer, D., Mondloch, C. J., & Lewis, T. L. (2007). Sleeper effects. Dev Sci, 10(1), 40-47.
Anu Sharma
College of Arts and Sciences, University of Colorado
Title: The Rewiring Brain: Cross-Modal Neuroplasticity in Hearing Loss
Anu Sharma, Ph.D. is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a Fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science and the Center for Neuroscience at the same university. Her research focuses on neuroplasticity in hearing loss, exploring the brain's response to auditory deprivation and the effects of intervention with hearing aids and cochlear implants in both children and adults. Her studies, funded by the United States National Institutes of Health for over two decades, provide critical insights into brain and behavioral outcomes in individuals with hearing loss.
Prof. Sharma has delivered more than 200 invited talks and keynotes across six continents, including prestigious lectures such as the Carhart Memorial Lecture at the American Auditory Society, the Marion Downs Lecture at the American Academy of Audiology (twice), and the Ted Evans Lecture at the British Society of Audiology. Her groundbreaking research continues to shape the understanding of auditory neuroplasticity and its clinical implications.
Linda B. Smith
Indiana University, Bloomington
Title: Controlling the input: A new framework for understanding experience-dependent visual development
Photo by Indiana University Walters Center
Linda B. Smith is a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on the sensorimotor dynamics of attention and learning, the development of visual object recognition, and early word learning. A central theoretical focus of her work is understanding developmental processes and mechanisms of change. She investigates how early changes in perception, language, and action influence one another, particularly during the crucial period when children between 12 and 24 months begin acquiring language. Her research takes a systemic approach, aiming to understand how multiple components interact across different timescales and levels of analysis to shape a child’s individual developmental trajectory.
For her outstanding contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, she has received numerous awards. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, she was awarded the David E. Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science and the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association. In 2019, she received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and in 2020, she was honored with the Koffka Medal.
With her visionary and inspiring research, Prof. Smith has profoundly shaped our understanding of developmental processes. Her work is highly cited and continues to serve as a foundation and inspiration for new research projects.
- Abstract:
Much of the information in the world is latent, not revealed without some action by the perceiver. What we see, for example, depends on our posture, on where we turn our heads and eyes, what we do with our hands, where we move and how we move. All these behaviors select and create visual experiences. In human infancy, these behaviors emerge and change systematically with motor development creating a curriculum of experience. Behavior also offers a way to control the input, to optimize the external signal of targets of attention and to dampen signals from distractors. As behavior changes over the first two years of life post birth, it creates new opportunities and challenges for visual learning and for visual attention. In this talk, I will present findings from our analyses of the visual statistics of infant ego-centric images (collected at the scale of daily life in the home). The data show how infant behavior optimizes the visibility of targets of attention and dampens the visibility of distractors, and in so doing biases the daily-life statistics of visual experience. The statistics in the input (sensory, semantic, temporal) change systematically with age. I will focus on the role of developmental changes in eye, head and hand movements. I will note that another factor is the learning of world-level visual statistics from the ordered curriculum of the developmentally changing statistics. These learned world statistics, priors, all influence behaviors that select and create visual experiences. The findings have relevance to experience-dependent visual development, more generally and also implications for the development of the self-regulation of attention.