Mentor: Dr. Amy Finn
Associate professor
Project Description
Children and adults experience and remember the same events differently. For example, a child might recall the perceptual details about a fish they saw at a restaurant–it had moss on it!–but struggle to reconstruct the order of events that took place at dinner. And children experience things differently too, seeing and hearing many things that adults miss. While this often means that children learn less from their experiences, it also means they can learn more and even sometimes better than adults, allowing them greater environmental knowledge and even possibly the ability to master novel skills that adults struggle to learn, including language. My work seeks to understand how these developmental tradeoffs emerge from children’s ongoing cognitive and brain development, accrual of world-knowledge, and development of attention and learning systems. To unpack how and, more importantly, why children learn differently across development, I cross traditionally disparate research disciplines–using tools from child development, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and education–and have developed the asynchronous development hypothesis. In it, I predict that children’s unique learning emerges from differential timelines in the development of core neurocognitive systems, leaving children with a changing balance of strengths and weaknesses as they grow.
Mentorship Statement
I provide hands-on research training by holding hour long meetings with individual highly qualified personnel (HQP), weekly lab meetings, and bi-weekly fMRI analysis sessions. Since my lab sits at the intersection of development, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, all of my HQP receive interdisciplinary training and attend weekly talk-series in (1) cognitive neuroscience and (2) development. I push my HQP to consider new findings in one domain with the lens from another and insist that they are able to “talk the language” of each field. My HQP also receive significant training in data analysis, which I teach one-on-one and via bi-weekly group fMRI analysis sessions. My HQP also attend a weekly MRI methods meeting, which I co-established and organized, wherein HQP get feedback on project ideas and discuss analysis techniques with faculty and HQP who are affiliated with ToNI. HQP also take (or audit) a course in computer programming, which I co-established, wherein they learn the fundamentals of version control, Python and R, experiment building, data organization, analysis, and visualization. I also provide highly structured and regular feedback on writing and oral presentations, and develop writing skills by collaboratively generating outlines, and later providing guiding comments as drafts are produced, staring with structure and moving to style.