Download PDF - St. Catherine's College - University of Oxford

CATZ RESEARCH
means simple, but increasingly feasible
by combining experimental methods that
assess looking (e.g., eye-tracking measures)
with child-friendly cognitive neuroscience
tools (e.g., electroencephalography, EEG,
or magnetoencephalography, MEG). As well
as assessing attention difficulties, we study
optimal interactions of attention with memory
and learning over typical development, from
early childhood into adulthood. I have been
very fortunate to gain depth in this work
through fantastic postdoctoral researchers
and doctoral students, while also building
breadth from collaborations with colleagues
in neuroscience, genetics and a longstanding
partnership with national associations
supporting children with genetic disorders and
their families. I am sure that it is thanks to
these outstanding colleagues at all levels that
my research was selected this year by the
British Psychological Society for the Margaret
Donaldson Prize, an award named after this
highly influential developmental psychologist,
for outstanding early career contributions to
the field of developmental psychology.
The data emerging from the studies
by my group and others operate at the
interface between attention disorders and
their cascading effects on cognition. They
continue to generate novel questions. For
example, how do attention deficits influence
interactions with complex environments
such as classrooms? Are attention deficits
predetermined to follow their course, or
instead malleable? I recently proposed to
study how attentional control mediates
outcomes across cognitive domains and in
everyday situations and, in order to test
the plasticity of attention difficulties and
their effects on other cognitive processes,
I proposed to contrast controlled training
regimes that modify domain-general
mechanisms like attention (training children
in ‘how to learn’) with domain-specific
interventions (training them on ‘what to
learn’). Through a six year award by the
James S McDonnell Foundation, these two
complementary approaches will target core
questions about mechanisms fostering the
developing mind, because they will test the
efficacy and specificity of attention training
effects across cognitive domains, and the
extent to which attention deficits associated
with an identified genetic aetiology or high
familial risk are amenable to environmental
influences.
I am very excited by these prospects for the
future! At least some of this enthusiasm
has clearly filtered to the many brilliant
undergraduate students with whom I have
had the pleasure to discuss recent work in
this area. I was therefore extremely proud
of receiving one of the first ‘Innovation in
Teaching Awards’ by the Oxford University
Student Union - I was told that students
taking my final year course particularly
enjoyed my continuous requests to appraise,
criticise and, quite openly ‘pull apart’
empirical studies and theoretical frameworks,
especially mine. To be asked to continue to
argue and think, by one’s own students, is a
real honour. n
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