Flux 2023 Poster Presentations
The Flux conference platforms discourse on brain development and cognitive neuroscience. The yearly conference, hosted by Flux Society, is set for September 6-9 in Santa Rosa, CA. Read about our lab members’ poster presentations on their ongoing projects!
Anatomical distinction and intervention-driven changes of frontal language regions in struggling readers
Hannah Stone, Poster 1-I-73, Poster session 1
In a Longitudinal Reading Intervention study of struggling readers we found that frontal language regions showed increased activation for attention-based tasks. These frontal regions were spatially distinct and divided into an anterior and posterior group for analysis. Each group showed similar but unique responses pre and post-intervention.
Mechanisms of visual spacial attention in reading in children
Maha Ramamurthy, Poster 1-A-2, Poster session 1
In an ecologically relevant paradigm for reading, we show that children (7 to 13 yrs) exhibit no time course for exogenous attention effects but endogenous effects are at least twice as much as exogenous effects at the longest cue-to-target interval. Endogenous valid cues also reduce encoding differences across letter positions, resulting in uniform encoding of elements within a string and therefore might be a key mechanism for the development of reading ability.
Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR): A platform for developmental cognitive neuroscience research at an unprecedented scale
Jasmine Tran and Jason Yeatman, Poster 1-F-42, Poster session 1
Deep phenotyping is the precise and comprehensive analysis of phenotypic variation and is the foundation of precision medicine. Here we describe development and validation of the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), a platform designed for deep phenotyping at an unprecedented scale. Each ROAR measure is designed to be a) lightly gamified and engaging across a broad age range, and b) completely automated such that a child can complete the measure in a web-browser without a test administrator. The ROAR platform integrates with the most common single sign-on and student identification systems used in schools facilitating collaborative research with schools, efficient data collection in large, diverse and representative samples, as well as longitudinal tracking of participants completing multiple tasks.
Intervention-Driven Changes in the Visual Word Form Area of Struggling Readers
Jamie Mitchell, Poster 2-J 79, Poster session 2
In an ongoing longitudinal study, we find that struggling readers develop subregions of the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) as they undergo an intensive reading intervention and learn how to read. This research replicates previous findings which demonstrate that children with dyslexia often lack a VWFA.
Educational Environment is Related to White Matter Development
Ethan Roy, Poster 2-F-41, Poster session 2
We leverage the unique data-crosswalk bridging the ABDC study and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) to explore the unique relationship between educational environment and white matter development. We find that educational environment is linked to accelerated white matter development and that these relationships are even more pronounced in white matter tracts subserving academic skills, such as reading.
Functional connectivity patterns of the visual word form area are stable during learning
Maya Yablonski, Poster 2-B-7, Poster session 2
We find that subregions of the visual word area have distinct patterns of functional connectivity with visual and language regions. In a longitudinal study, we show that these connectivity patterns can be observed in children with dyslexia and are stable over time.
Developmental changes in the serial position function for different visual elements
Grace Adebogun, Poster 3-O 114, Poster session 3
Using a multi-element processing task, we sought to examine (1) how age and reading ability impact the accuracy with which various elements in a string are visually processed and (2) how position within the string impacts accuracy, as displayed by the shape of the serial position function. We found that adults displayed higher overall accuracy than children, though the general shape of each distinct serial position function remained the same for both age groups. We also found that task performance did correlate with reading ability.
