Yael Arbel - US grants

This project will illuminate neurophysiological processes responsible for children's efficient use of feedback. Children regularly encounter feedback at school and home as they learn new information or acquire new skills. Young learners must extract information from feedback, ignoring irrelevant, false, or misleading feedback, and using helpful feedback to adjust behavior and modify learning strategies. The ability to use feedback efficiently is an element of active, self-regulated learning that is critical to academic success. Understanding such learning in children requires studying how the quality of feedback processing in the brain changes with age through the early school years. By examining how individual cognitive differences affect the development of feedback processing, this project will enable development of effective evidence-based teaching approaches and computer-based learning programs that are tailored for children of different ages and with diverse cognitive profiles. The project will also lead to advances in treatments for children with developmental language disorders whose therapy relies on feedback provision. A broadly representative sample of children will participate in this research, and the study results will be shared with educators via education events held at schools serving low income and underrepresented students.

Feedback processing will be examined in eight- and ten-year-old children who will be followed over three years. In each yearly visit, children will learn new information using corrective feedback while their EEG is recorded. EEG activity will be analyzed to longitudinally investigate changes in children's ability to learn from feedback. The results will improve understanding of how feedback impacts learning, and how this impact changes with age. Working memory measures will also be collected each year and examined in relation to changes in feedback-based learning. The project involves a detailed evaluation of the maturation of feedback processing between 8 and 13 years of age, a period that marks significant developmental changes in self-regulated learning. To increase the representativeness of the participants in the project, transportation will be arranged for interested families with limited mobility.

PROJECT SUMMARY Language Impairment is one of the most common communication disorders treated by speech-language pathologists. The disorder is characterized by impaired development of spoken language that cannot be attributed to hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, or other known neurological deficits (Benton, 1964). Treatment provided to children with LI relies heavily on the provision of corrective feedback. However, such a teaching method may not be optimal because abnormalities in brain circuits that support feedback-based learning have been reported in children with LI. More specifically, the same brain circuits that have been implicated in implicit learning (basal ganglia and in particular the striatum), and have been found abnormal in function or structure in children with LI, have also been implicated in feedback-based learning. The proposed study is a critical first step in establishing whether learning is disrupted in children with LI by the need to process corrective feedback. It will also assess the benefit of providing children with LI with a learning environment that does not rely on feedback processing. Children will perform two probabilistic classification learning tasks, one with feedback (feedback- based) and the other without feedback (paired-associate). The project will examine behaviorally and at the neurophysiological level the effects of corrective feedback on the learning of children with LI in comparison to their peers. It will compare learning outcomes (accuracy level on test trials immediately following the task and a week after the task) and strategy use (single cue vs multi-cue) in children with LI and those with TD under the two learning conditions. It will also compare the activation of a neurophysiological marker of feedback processing (i.e., the Feedback Related Negativity) during the feedback-based task between children with LI and those with TD. This is the first study that evaluates the effect of corrective feedback on learning outcomes and learning strategies in children with LI. The neurophysiological measure serves to examine the intactness of the neural generator of a brain potential linked to feedback processing. Since this neural generator has been implicated in implicit learning, findings will shed light on the relationship between feedback processing and implicit learning in children with LI. Understanding whether children with LI learn better with or without the need to process corrective feedback will lead to improvement in the teaching techniques employed with children with LI, and to the development of effective intervention that takes into consideration these children?s unique learning profile.

PROJECT SUMMARY Language Impairment is one of the most common communication disorders treated by speech-language pathologists. The disorder is characterized by impaired development of spoken language that cannot be attributed to hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, or other known neurological deficits (Benton, 1964). A major challenge in developing effective interventions for DLD is that the impaired learning mechanism underling the disorder is not yet understood. The project?s overarching goal is to fill this critical gap, so that treatment can be delivered in a manner that maximizes learning success. A leading theory suggests that the underlying cause for the language learning difficulties in children with DLD is a deficit in the ability to implicitly extract regularities. Within the framework of this theory, explicit learning strategies should be used to support learning in children with this disorder. Indeed, treatment provided to school-age children with DLD relies heavily on explicit learning by breaking down complex linguistic structures and syntactic regularities into small units that are taught explicitly, using verbalization and memorization. However, these teaching techniques may not be effective as rely on language-based explicit learning that is known to be significantly affected in children with DLD. The proposed project will test a novel hypothesis whereby that the learning deficit in DLD is rooted in an ineffective management of the interaction between explicit and implicit learning, caused by an impaired executive function of shifting. The project proposes that children with DLD demonstrate overreliance on explicit learning, and are failing to initiate a shift to implicit learning during complex learning, because of their impaired executive function of shifting. The project will examine behaviorally and at the neurophysiological level learning of complex structures by children with DLD and by their age and gender matched peers. Learning outcomes, use of strategies, and electrophysiological measured of implicit knowledge will be assessed in relation to the children?s shifting abilities, using two learning paradigms. The two learning paradigms will vary in the extent to which explicit learning is suppressed to evaluate whether eliminating the need to overcome the explicit bias and to initiate a shift improves complex learning in DLD. A well-established electrophysiological measure (the P600 event related potential that detects implicit knowledge of grammatical violations) will determine whether explicit learning hinders the acquisition and/or the expression of implicit knowledge in DLD. Understanding whether learning of complex structures in DLD is facilitated by the suppression of explicit learning strategies and by eliminating the need to shift from explicit to implicit learning will lead to improvement in the teaching techniques employed with children with DLD, and to the development of effective interventions that take into consideration these children?s unique learning profile.