child development
edyong | March 30, 2009For any animal, it pays to be able to spot other animals in order to find mates and companions and to avoid predators. Fortunately, many animals move in a distinct way, combining great flexibility with the constraints of a rigid skeleton - that sets them apart from inanimate objects like speeding trains or flying balls. The ability to detect this "biological motion" is incredibly important. Chicks have it. Cats have it. Even two-day-old babies have it. But autistic children do not.
Ami Klim from Yale has found that two-year-old children with autism lack normal preferences for natural…
edyong | March 7, 2009
Most of us could easily distinguish between spoken English and French. But could you tell the difference between an English and a French speaker just by looking at the movements of their lips? It seems like a difficult task. But surprising new evidence suggest that babies can meet this challenge at just a few months of age.
Young infants can certainly tell the difference between the sounds of different languages. Whitney Weikum and colleagues from the University of British Columbia decided to test their powers of visual discrimination.
They showed 36 English babies silent video clips of…
edyong | February 22, 2009The trauma of child abuse can last a lifetime, leading to a higher risk of anxiety, depression and suicide further down the line. This link seems obvious, but a group of Canadian scientists have found that it has a genetic basis.
By studying the brains of suicide victims, Patrick McGowan from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, found that child abuse modifies a gene called NR3C1 that affects a person's ability to deal with stress. The changes it wrought were "epigenetic", meaning that the gene's DNA sequence wasn't altered but it's structure was modified to make it less active.…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
edyong | February 15, 2009
A child in the womb is not just some hapless creature waiting to be born into a world of experience. It is preparing. Through its mother, it senses the conditions of the world outside and its body plans its growth accordingly.
There is strong evidence that people who are under-nourished as embryos grow up to have higher risks of heart disease and other chronic illnesses. For example, people born to women during the Dutch Famine of 1945 had higher risks of coronary heart disease as adults.
We might nod our heads at this as if it were expected news, but it's actually quite a strange result…
edyong | February 3, 2009Our health isn't just affected by the things we do after we're born - the conditions we face inside our mother's womb can have a lasting impact on our wellbeing, much later in life. This message comes from a growing number of studies that compare a mother's behaviour during pregnancy to the subsequent health of her child.
But all of these studies have a problem. Mothers also pass on half of their genes to their children, and it's very difficult to say which aspects of the child's health are affected by conditions in the womb, and which are influenced by mum's genetic legacy.
Take the case…
edyong | November 24, 2008Have you ever seen someone that you're sure you recognise but whose face you just can't seem to place? It's a common enough occurrence, but for some people, problems with recognising faces are a part of their daily lives. They have a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which makes them incredibly bad at recognising faces, despite their normal eyesight, memory, intelligence, and ability to recognise other objects.
Prosopagnosia can be caused by accidents that damage parts of the brain like the fusiform gyrus - the core part of a broad network of regions involved in processing…
edyong | October 7, 2008
It is the instinct of every mother to protect their children as they grow up, shielding them from the dangers of the outside world. Right from birth, life can be a difficult experience. Within a few hours, the child is sent from a safe, warm, constantly-nourished cocoon into a bright, noisy and threatening world. This stressful transition poses a serious threat to the newborn's vulnerable and still-developing mind. But new research has shown that even in these first vital hours, mothers are already inadvertently protecting their children - by shutting down their brain cells.
In…
edyong | August 27, 2008 Yesterday, I wrote about selfless capuchin monkeys, who find personal reward in the act of giving other monkeys. The results seemed to demonstrate that monkeys are sensitive to the welfare of their peers, and will make choices that benefit others without any material gain for themselves. Today, another study looks at the same processes in a very different sort of cheeky monkey - human children.
Humans are notable among other animals for our vast capacity for cooperation and empathy. Our concern about the experiences of other people, and our natural aversion to unfair play are the bedrocks…
edyong | July 15, 2008Which of these strings of letters is easier to remember: QKJITJGPI or BBCITVCNN?
Chances are, you chose the latter string, where the nine letters are the combined names of three television networks. This neatly illustrates a fundamental property of human memory - that we remember long strings of information more easily if we can break them down into bite-sized chunks. In this case, a nine-letter string can be divided into three lots of three letters. You probably use similar strategies for remembering telephone numbers, credit card details, or post codes.
Now, Lisa Feigenson and Justin…