News and Events

Some of our researchers presented at the recent International Congress of Infant Studies 2022 in Ottawa:

Professor Larissa Samuelson is giving a talk at Pint of Science on 9th May. Little words for little people: Knowing when they know. Infants and toddlers vary widely in their rate of early word learning – variation that is predictive of later language development and school success. In this talk, Prof Larissa Samuelson will discuss the difficulties children face when learning even a single concrete noun, and the work being done in UEA’s Developmental Dynamics Laboratory to understand individual children’s unique word learning pathways – work with the goal of informing interventions for children struggling to learn words. More info here https://pintofscience.co.uk/event/teach-em-young-speak-sleep-repeat​

Professor John Spencer is giving a talk at Pint of Science on 11th May. How poverty impacts the developing brain…and what we might do to help. I will discuss recent evidence showing that poverty has a negative impact on brain development. Such impacts can be measured even in the first year of life. While poverty has consequences, I will also show data suggesting that the brain is incredibly flexible in early development, giving us hope that we can overcome these negative impacts with new intervention strategies. More info here https://pintofscience.co.uk/event/back-on-track-overcoming-challenges-to-the-brain​

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Read all our latest news in our annual newsletter and celebrate with us the completion of the UK Brain Study data collection.

DDLab Newsletter 2021

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In October 2021 Professor John Spencer presented at the Norwich Science Festival. His talk titled 'How does poverty impact on the developing brain?' discussed some of the initial findings from his large-scale brain studies examining the early development of visual working memory. The data suggests that we can track the impact of adversity on cognitive and brain development as early as six months of age, which opens the door to global efforts on early assessment and intervention. The full talk can be watched here​

In July 2021 we celebrated the opening of our £3 million state-of-the-art neuroimaging research centre. Read more about it here

In April 2021 Professor Larissa Samuelson presented at the UEA London Lectures. Her talk titled 'How children learn words: Individual Differences and Common Processes' discussed the difficulties children have when learning even a single concrete noun. She explains the research being undertaken in the labs to understand individual children's unique learning pathways. The full talk can be watched here​

Our annual newsletter brings you up-to-date with what has been happening in the labs over the last 12 months. Read about our studies and the progress we have made and how this is helping us to understand more about early child development.

Download the DDLab Newsletter 2020

Some of our researchers presented at the recent International Congress of Infant Studies:

Milena Bakapoulou presenting 'Visual Exploration in Novel Noun Generalisation Task' A window on the relationship between vocabulary and shape bias​

Laia Fibla presenting Early Language Processing and Language Exposure Across Cultures: UK and India​

Laia Fibla presenting her poster: The LENA system applied to the Awadhi dialect: Measuring language exposure in rural India​

Prerna Aneja presenting Bringing Advanced Technology to Developing Countries to Asses Parent-Infant Interaction​

In June 2019 we held a celebratory picnic at the UEA for all our families enrolled on our 5 year 'Brain Study' looking at working memory and early brain development. We are also running a companion study in Uttar Pradesh, India to examine how early adversity including poverty and under-nutrition impacts working memory. Altogether, across the two projects, we are studying over 400 families worldwide!

Join us at this year's Festival - we will be demonstrating some cool technology and talking all things developmental psychology.