Patricia J. Bauer - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Representing and recalling the past are fundamental capacities that most adults take for granted. Traditionally, it was thought that a variety of deficits rendered children under three incapable of sharing this feature of mental life. Contrary to the assumption that young children are unable to store and retrieve memories, it now is apparent that by late in the first and throughout the second and year of rife, developments in explicit recognition and recall are well underway. What remains largely unexplored are age-related changes in the basic parameters that underlie these developments. Also relatively neglected is what happens to early memories as the mnemonic system that would retain them matures. To address these issues, the goals of the proposed research are to (1) Investigate early developments in long-term explicit memory processes. There is increasing evidence that the neural substrate that supports explicit memories over the long-term begins to coalesce in the second half of the first year of life. Variability in Long-term memory in this period is consistent with this suggestion. Behavioral and electrophysiological investigations of the source(s) of variability, and thus of the generators of developmental change, are the focus of 5 experiments (2) Examine the vulnerability of memory traces over the short term. Nonverbal tests of explicit memory have revealed that young children remember aspects of events over significant periods of time. However, rapid forgetting in the hours, days, and weeks after encoding also is in evidence. lnvestigation of short-term forgetting, and its likely implications for long-term memory, are the subjects of three experiments. (3) Establish the course of development of episodic memory. Whereas quite young children retain explicit memories over long delays, it is not clear that their memories a re-episodic in nature. In fight of evidence of involvement of frontal structures in retrieval of episodic features, and of protracted development of frontal structures, asymmetrical development of general event memory and specific episodic memory is to be expected. lnvestigations of developments in memory for specific episodes are the focus of two experiments. (4) Examine developments in autobiographical memory. Preschool children evidence substantial competence in recollection of personally significant events. These findings deepen the mystery of why early memories seem, after childhood, to disappear. Investigations of the long-term fate of early memories, and of the impact of early determinants on later auto-biographical reports, are the subjects of the final three experiments.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of the proposed program is to train predoctoral and postdoctoral students in research in developmental psychology. The application is to continue a research training program that has had continuous NIMH support since 1959. The training site, the Institute of Child Development (founded in 1925), holds a unique position as an internationally known, premier center of research in developmental science. The community of scholars at the Institute engages in substantive and significant basic research on the development of biological, sensory, perceptual, cognitive, social, and emotional processes. Simultaneously, the Institute faculty and students seek to "give away" knowledge of human development; and to engage in collaborative work across several disciplines, including the interface between brain and behavior, and between individuals and the contextual systems in which their development is embedded, such as family, peers, schools, community, and cultural systems. The training program would provide support for four predoctoral scholars per year, at least one of whom would be engaged in interdisciplinary research in the critical fields of developmental psychopathology or developmental neuroscience; appointments are for two years. Predoctoral trainees entering the program will have completed baccalaureate studies in psychology or a related field and occasionally will have had some graduate training. Predoctoral trainees complete a full major and minor program, including coursework, research and teaching apprenticeships, and examinations. The training program also would provide support for two postdoctoral trainees per year; appointments are for two years. Postdoctoral trainees would be recruited from two categories of individuals: those whose doctoral studies were not in developmental psychology, but who desire research training in developmental science; and those whose training was in development science, but who seek expanded interdisciplinary training in developmental psychopathology or developmental neuroscience. The primary engagement of postdoctoral trainees is research. The training site is located on the main campus of the University of Minnesota. It includes state-of-the-art computer, laboratory, and library facilities, as well as offices for staff, students, and trainees. The faculty includes 17 professors, whose work ranges across the entire discipline.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this application is to permit me, a cognitive developmental scientist, to expand my research and scholarship by securing training in cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, and the brain imaging technique of high-density electrophysiological (ERP) recording. These opportunities are important in light of movement in the field of cognitive development in a direction that demands expertise not only in the study of behavior, but in the neural bases of cognition and the tools that make advances in our understanding of it possible. At present, few individuals have the combination of skills necessary to realize the multidisciplinary potential that is on the horizon. I already possess expertise in the scientific study of behavior. With the proposed training, I will be well positioned to link observed behavior developments with their underlying neural substrates, thereby enhancing our understanding of the processes and determinants of developmental change. To accomplish this goal, I propose to undertake formal coursework and training in cognitive neuroscience and developmental neuroscience, as well as formal and informal training in the neurophysics on which interpretation of high-density ERP data depends. The majority of the training will take place through the department of neuroscience and at the Institute of Child Development, an internationally known, premier center of research on developmental processes; additional training will take place in the laboratories of colleagues with expertise in high-density ERP techniques. In the immediate future, the training will enhance my research on memory development in infancy and early childhood. The research involves a combination of behavioral and ERP measures to examine age-related changes in the reliability and robustness of long-term recall, and in the short-term vulnerability of memory traces. The changes likely are linked to developments in the neural substrate supporting the storage and subsequent retrieval of long-term memories. Specifically, I hypothesize that age-related changes in the structures that support long-term explicit memory, and in their connectivity, are associated with developmental differences in the speed and efficiency with which memory traces are integrated and consolidated which in turn are associated with developmental changes in long-term recall. The combination of the methods and conceptualizations of cognitive developmental science with those of cognitive and developmental neuroscience that will result from the proposed training and research will permit strong tests of this hypothesis and thus advance our knowledge of structure/function relations in development. In the 20-plus-year balance of my professional career, I will share my expertise with the undergraduate and graduate students that I train and with the field at large.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to recall changes dramatically in the 2nd half of the 1st year of life. During this period there is great variability in performance: some infants recall after long delays, whereas others do not. One factor underlying individual differences may be variability in the developmental status of the neural substrate, specifically components of the hippocampus. Although there are no direct measures of hippocampal functioning for use with typically developing human infants, a promising indirect measure is trace eyeblink conditioning, which is known to be hippocampally dependent, making performance on the task an excellent candidate as a marker for hippocampal development in human infants. In spite of this potential, there have been no studies of changes in trace eyeblink conditioning across the 1st year of life, a period of substantial & significant hippocampal development. The proposed research is the first such study & also is the first in what will be a series of investigations of relations between hippocampal development (as measured by age-related changes in trace eyeblink conditioning) & long-term memory assessed via recognition (measured using event- related potentials: ERPs) & recall (measured by elicited & deferred imitation). The first aim of the proposal is to examine changes in performance on delay (standard & long) & trace eyeblink conditioning tasks across the latter half of the first year. Due to differential development of the neural structures implicated in the tasks (cerebellum & hippocampus, respectively), delay conditioning performance is expected to change more rapidly than trace conditioning performance. The second specific aim is to compare infants' performance on delay & trace conditioning tasks with that of adults' to determine relative functional maturity of behavior. Because trace eyeblink conditioning can be tested across the lifespan & across species (more typically, different populations must be tested on different tasks), it can be used to examine continuities & discontinuities in memory development. Because the task can be used across species, it has enormous potential to "diagnose" the specific source of memory impairment in special populations of human infants known to experience memory deficits (e.g., infants of diabetic mothers; infants born prior to term but otherwise healthy). Development of trace eyeblink conditioning as a marker for hippocampal development thus holds significant promise for basic as well as translational research. The ability to recall changes dramatically in the 2nd half of the 1st year of life. At this early age, impairments in memory are apparent in the behavior of at-risk groups, including infants of diabetic mothers and infants born prior to term but otherwise healthy. One factor implicated in both normative development and behavioral deficits is the integrity of the hippocampus. The proposed research is to test trace eyeblink conditioning as a possible marker or probe of the integrity of the hippocampus, thereby establishing the task for use in early diagnosis and treatment. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Like most psychological phenomena, learning and memory are influenced by many factors and undergo pronounced changes with development. Moreover, they interact with one another: what a child has learned in the past influences (though does not determine) what s/he remembers, and what a child remembers from an experience constrains what s/he learns from it. Although learning and memory are intimately linked, the fundamental question of how children connect individual episodes in time so that they contribute to the development of a general knowledge base has gone largely unexplored. The question is especially relevant as children enter the school years and find themselves in settings that demand that they integrate information that has been acquired at different times and in different contexts. The purpose of the proposed research is to initiate a systematic study of how information learned at different times becomes linked in memory. The research similarity of the elements of the separate episodes. These three aims are pursued in two experiments with children 5 to 6 years of age (kindergarten and first grade, respectively). The age range was selected because it is during this time that the demands of formal schooling are introduced, including the expectation that children will accumulate information over the course of a term, and be able to integrate it with information learned previously. The vehicle is a shared book reading, an activity in which children engage from infancy and from which they are expected to acquire knowledge. Learning and memory are linked: what a child learns influences what s/he remembers. Yet how children link individual episodes in time so that they contribute to the growth of a general knowledge base has gone largely unexplored. The question is especially relevant as children enter their school years where impaired ability to integrate information is associated with academic failure and poor mental health (including anxiety and depression). The proposed research initiates systematic study of developmental changes in the linkage of separate episodes in memory. 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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Like most psychological phenomena, learning and memory are influenced by many factors and undergo pronounced changes with development. Moreover, they interact with one another: what a child has learned in the past influences (though does not determine) what s/he remembers, and what a child remembers from an experience constrains what s/he learns from it. Although learning and memory are intimately linked, the question of how children build up a knowledge base from the individual events that they experience and remember has not been a focus of attention in the developmental literature. The relevance of the complementary question-how children keep individual episodes separate in memory- has been acknowledged for some time and has received considerable attention. Yet the fundamental question of how children connect individual episodes in time so that they contribute to the development of a general knowledge base has gone largely unexplored. The question is especially relevant as children enter the school years and find themselves in settings that demand that they integrate information that has been acquired at different times and in different contexts. Initial studies supported by R03 HD57291 demonstrated that 4- and 6-year-old children integrate between episodes under optimal testing circumstances. The proposed extension of this research has three specific aims: 1) To examine age-related changes in integration by preschool and early school-age children under conditions that more closely mimic those they encounter in educational and incidental learning situations. 2) To test factors expected to increase versus decrease the probability of integration of information learned in separate episodes. 3) To examine possible consequences of self-generation of knowledge through integration- relative to information explicitly taught-including more robust retention and greater resistance to interference. These three aims are pursued in 7 experiments with children 4, 6, and 8 years of age. The age range was selected because it is during this time that the demands of formal schooling are introduced, including the expectation that children will accumulate information over the course of a term, and integrate it.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many of the experiences of everyday life induce emotional reactions, ranging from low to highly arousing. There has been substantial progress in understanding how adults process emotional events. The work has made clear that the ways in which individuals represent and express their emotional experiences has implications for mental health. Because of the importance of emotional construal to the quality of everyday life and to mental health, it is crucial that we understand emotion processing across the lifespan. Research with adults has revealed characteristic patterns of response to emotional stimuli as well as both individual and gender differences in processing of emotional experience. There also has been substantial research on expression and regulation of emotion early in development, as young children are beginning to learn about the causes and consequences of emotional experiences. In contrast, there has been little research on emotion processing in the elementary school years and into adolescence. As a result, we know little about the timing or course of developmental changes leading up to mature emotion processing. The proposed research will begin to fill these gaps by using the neuroimaging tool of event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine emotion processing in school-age children through middle adolescence. ERPs are ideally suited to examination of emotion processing due to their exquisite temporal resolution (on the scale of milliseconds), permitting observation of emotional responses in real time, as they are experienced. The work will be used to address two specific aims: (1a) examination of developmental changes in emotion processing in school- age children to young adolescents, with samples sufficiently large to permit examination of the emergence of gender-differential patterns of emotion processing that may be associated with internalizing and externalizing disorders (in females and males, respectively); (1b) examination of the emergence of patterns of neural response to emotional stimuli that are typical in adults, yet which to date have not been observed in children; and (2) examining emotion processing both as children process emotional stimuli for the first time and as they re-experience the events through memory, thereby providing a more complete perspective on developmental changes in emotion processing. The proposed research will elucidate the typical course of development of emotion processing in childhood through middle adolescence, when mature patterns of emotion processing are expected to become apparent. The research will be foundational for later translational work aimed at understanding emotion processing gone awry, such as observed in internalizing and externalizing disorders of childhood and adolescence. The combination of paradigms for examining processing of emotion in the moment and based on memory will be especially powerful, with high ecological validity.

DESCRIPTION (provided by the applicant): The proposed Training Program will train predoctoral students in the mechanisms of learning across development and species. Learning is fundamental to adaptive behavior. It involves acquiring and modifying information, behaviors, and skills. Learning also is productive: it extends itself through induction, deduction, and integration. Mechanisms of learning is a critical area to target for predoctoral research training because learning has pervasive impacts in both adaptive and maladaptive behavior, and must be an integral part of any successful mental health or educational intervention. The Training Faculty is drawn from the Department of Psychology, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and the interdisciplinary Neuroscience Graduate Program, all of Emory University. The primary training sites are the Department of Psychology and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The 16- member Training Faculty approach study of the mechanisms of learning as they manifest from birth to old age in healthy and clinical populations using genetic, comparative, computational, developmental, neurobiological, and neuropsychological techniques. They examine how changes in the brain during infancy and childhood relate to developmental changes in learning, how the elderly adapt with their aging brains, and how diverse species acquire and modify knowledge ranging from simple associations to culturally-mediated rituals and traditions. The diversity of ages, species, and circumstances in which learning mechanisms are studied at Emory provides rich opportunities for accumulation of converging evidence about these mechanisms, and thus for equipping the next generation of scientists with the skills necessary for understanding basic mechanisms of learning. The training site affords a uniquely well- suited environment in which to accomplish one of the goals of the NIH-to unite the study of developmental change from infancy to senescence with the study of adult cognition within a neurobiological framework. We request four predoctoral trainees per year, each of whom will be trained for 3 years. Trainees will be drawn from among students in Emory's highly-selective Laney Graduate School. Trainees will complete all departmental or program requirements for the Ph.D. This training program will provide added value through at least five training enhancements: 1) explicit co-mentoring and collaborative research experiences across species, ages or methodologies; 2) intensive training in grant writing, 3) advanced training in ethics and the responsible conduct of research; 4) participation in courses, workshops and research fairs specific to research on learning across development and species; and 5) application of empirically supported best practices in graduate student training.

An important goal of development is establishing a rich knowledge base to support educational and professional achievement. Much of the information that people have in their knowledge base they learned through direct instruction. Yet learners also go beyond what they are taught and integrate information across media (text, video) and across multiple experiences to generate new conclusions. Self-generation of knowledge is assumed to play an important role in education, allowing learners to extend the scope of each individual lesson. In spite of its presumed significance for education, self-generation has not been examined in the classroom. This research will test self-generation in the classroom and how it relates to academic achievement. The studies will take place 1) in traditional single-language classrooms and 2) in an increasing common educational model in which children learn through two languages (dual-language instruction). When content is presented in different languages, learners must integrate not only across media and time, but across languages as well. Understanding self-generation of knowledge in single- and dual-language classrooms, and how it relates to academic achievement, are the central goals of this research. The outcome will benefit society by helping to optimize educational practice in both traditional and dual-language settings.

The proposed work aims to examine integration and subsequent self-generation of information acquired in separate episodes in classroom environments. Concurrent and longitudinal individual difference measures of cognitive ability will be examined as possible underlying skills supporting knowledge extension in the classroom. Relations between knowledge generation and measures of academic performance also will be examined. Second, the study of self-generation will be extended into dual-language, an increasingly common model of education. Situations to be examined include information presented through different languages (English/Spanish) and information presented through the same language but tested in the alternate language. Finally, the work aims to address the paradox that in spite of presumed challenges to successful learning and extension of knowledge across language contexts, dual-language education has excellent academic outcomes. The expectation is that achievement of second-language proficiency minimizes the conceptual distance between to-be-integrated materials, supporting cross-language integration. Ultimately, the research will inform the underlying mechanisms necessary for self-generation of new knowledge through integration as well as how different language systems are represented and interact within an individual. The research has applied implications for educational practice in both dual-language and traditional education models.

A major educational goal is to build a knowledge base. To foster this goal, educators employ numerous techniques & strategies, including direct instruction, reading, & discussion, to name a few. Importantly, for education to have its maximum impact, learners must go beyond what is directly given to generate novel understandings. Without this capacity, learning would proceed exceedingly slowly, as each fact is acquired in turn. Fortunately, learners are not restricted to acquisition of information in this tedious way. Instead, they employ (deliberately or otherwise) a number of logical processes that permit valid extensions of knowledge through self-generation of new information. One such productive process is the subject of the proposed research, namely, self-derivation of new factual knowledge through integration of separate yet related episodes of new learning. The process requires that information newly learned in one episode (e.g., liquids expand with heat) be integrated with information newly learned in another (e.g., thermometers contain liquid) to derive new knowledge (thermometers work because liquid expands as heat increases). Such novel understandings are the currency of academic as well as vocational success. Our research has revealed both individual and age-related variability in this productive process in childhood. The mechanisms involved in this form of productive knowledge extension, & that contribute to age-related variability therein, have yet to be explicated. Moreover, whether individual variability is stable over time, and the domain-general cognitive abilities and component processes that relate to it, have yet to be examined systematically. Answers to these questions are vital because self-derivation of new knowledge through integration is linked to academic success in children (Esposito & Bauer 2017) & adults (Varga, Esposito & Bauer 2018). Accordingly, Aim 1 is to explicate patterns of age-related change and individual developmental trajectories in self-derivation and retention of new factual knowledge through integration across the elementary school years. This aim will be addressed in two cohorts of children tested at yearly intervals for 3 years: Cohort 1: ages 7, 8, & 9; Cohort 2: ages 9, 10, & 11. Aim 2 is to identify sources of variability in self-derivation and retention of new factual knowledge. We will test concurrent & longitudinal predictors from two categories: (A) General cognitive abilities including working & episodic memory (a.k.a. ?fluid? abilities) & the depth and breadth of accumulated semantic knowledge (a.k.a. ?crystallized? abilities; Aim 2a). (B) How effectively the component processes involved in integration & self-derivation are carried out (Aim 2b). By explicating the mechanisms of this productive process and the variables that limit its rate of development, we advance the ultimate goal of developing means of facilitating accrual of knowledge, and thus positive developmental, educational, and vocational outcomes.