Current Projects

Attention Fluctuations in Childhood

Have you gotten distracted or noticed your mind wandering during a task, even when you’re trying to focus? That’s because attention naturally fluctuates – it doesn’t remain steady all the time. Everyone experiences occasional lapses in attention, but difficulty with maintaining focus consistently can have important real-world implications, interfering with learning, task performance, and academic success. Yet, we know little about how children learn to control their attention consistently and why some children struggle with sustaining their attention more than others. This project will investigate when, how, and why children’s attention fluctuates from moment to moment, using fun and engaging games. By better understanding how children learn to control their attention, we can identify ways to help children build stronger attention skills early in life and support their learning in and out of the classroom.

Sounds and Stories

When you are talking to a friend in a coffee shop, how do you pay attention to what your friend is saying while ignoring all the other conversations happening around you? How does your brain detect irregularities in sounds and speech, even when you are not paying attention? This project focuses on the development of brain functions that support our abilities to attend to relevant sounds, ignore irrelevant sounds, and detect regularities in our soundscapes. Using electroencephalography (EEG), this project investigates how diverse environmental experiences contribute to auditory perception and attention in early childhood.

Brain Functions Supporting Cognitive Control in Childhood

Early childhood is characterized by rapid developmental changes in cognitive control, yet our understanding of how neural indices of these abilities change within individuals over time remains limited. Our prior work demonstrated that developmental trajectories of ERP indices of cognitive control are component-specific in early childhood. Building on this work, our research group is currently investigating when and how the timing, form, and function of neural responses supporting cognitive control change, especially during early elementary school years, in children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

Engagement of Cognitive Control in the Context of Childhood Experiences

Children can engage different cognitive control mechanisms to reach their goals, sometimes preparing in advance and other times engaging control in the moment. However, we know little about how children’s home environments relate to the flexible engagement of cognitive control in childhood. This project examines what cognitive control mechanisms children rely on or prefer to engage in response to the moment-to-moment challenges of goal attainment, in the context of their home environments and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Adult Cognition in Context

The excellent temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) allowed the discovery of various divergences in how and when neural responses are observed in cognitive control tasks in clinical adult populations compared to neurotypical adults. A comprehensive understanding of cognitive control functioning in neurotypical adults remains important for advancing our understanding of the causes and consequences of mental health disorders. This project investigates how contextual factors, in particular socioeconomic factors and childhood experiences, contribute to the functioning of brain systems supporting cognitive control in adulthood.

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