brain development
sastyk | February 10, 2016We came back from the developmental pediatrician yesterday in a jubilant mood. Two of my sons came to us with significant developmental delays. Both of them have made wonderful progress, so last night was an occasion for celebration.
A lot of parents have children who are delayed in some ways. Some kids catch up. Some catch up part of the way. Some never do. It can be a huge struggle to trust that you are doing things "right." After almost 16 years of parenting kids with significant disabilities, I've come to feel that as long as you are in there working to support your kids and get…
jhalper | November 18, 2012The idea of “seeing the world through the eyes of a child” takes on new meaning when the observer is a computer. Institute scientists in the Lab for Vision and Robotics Research took their computer right back to babyhood and used it to ask how infants first learn to identify objects in their visual field.
How do you create an algorithm that imitates the earliest learning processes? What do you assume is already hard-wired into the newborn brain, as opposed to the new information it picks up by repeated observation? And finally, how do you get a computer to make that leap from a data-crunching…
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2010
Click to enlarge
THIS cartoon by Dwayne Godwin, a professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and Jorge Cham, the former researcher and cartoonist who created PhD Comics, has won first place in the informational graphics category of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
The New York Times has a slide show of the winning entries, and today's issue of Science contains a special feature about the competition. To see the full size infographic, click on the image above, or visit Godwin's public engagement page, where it, and others…
ddobbs | June 12, 2009
Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by TV -- found this seems to be the case.
Christakis decided to try to address these questions with research. Together with several colleagues, he examined a database called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. After analysing some 1,300 children for whom the appropriate data were available, they…