Professor's work is at intersection of education and neuroscience
by Melanie Moran
photo by Steve Green
How does the brain change during learning? What individual differences in brain circuitry make it harder for some kids to learn certain skills?
Bruce McCandliss, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, asks these questions in his lectures and in conversations with graduate students and teachers. Exploring how differences in individual children’s brains impact learning – and how education in turn shapes brain development – are issues that drive his research.
“Some of the principles and findings from systems-level neuroscience are starting to provide insights that speak to these questions and help us understand individual differences and educational interventions in new ways,” he said.
McCandliss, who earned his B.S. in psychology from Michigan State University, his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Oregon and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh, came to Vanderbilt in January 2009 as the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology and Human Development. He was previously on faculty at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College, where he was one of the founding members of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and where he was recognized with a Presidential Early Career for Achievement in Science and Engineering Award in November 2007.
This fall, McCandliss and the members of his new Educational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory are launching a National Science Foundation-funded project in Nashville schools.
“We’re exploring, for the first time, how differences in children’s brain activity and brain structure wind up predicting how they respond to first-grade math instruction,” McCandliss said. “We are also exploring changes in children’s brain structure and function related to the new sorts of thinking encouraged in the first year of formal schooling.”
McCandliss also is interested in how language learning changes across development. As principal investigator of a multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health study, he is investigating the neural underpinnings of a poorly understood phenomenon: young children’s ability to learn multiple languages with greater ease than adults.
“One of the mysteries of human learning is why ease of learning a second language gets harder as we reach adulthood, even though learning in most other domains gets easier,” he said. “Even the best brain scientists don’t have clear insights into what’s changing in the brain that explains these differences between children and adults.
“We are now using brain imaging to study such changes directly and hope to soon understand the dynamics of brain activity that explain age-related differences in language learning.”
These projects are part of a larger goal of making deep connections across learning, education and neuroscience, which is a growing intersection at Vanderbilt.
“Vanderbilt has state-of-the-art neuroimaging facilities and a highly collaborative community, including Peabody College, which is leading the nation in research on education and human development,” McCandliss said. “This makes Vanderbilt an ideal place to bring these two strengths together into new research on educational neuroscience.”
McCandliss is bringing his discipline-crossing work into the classroom this semester with a new graduate seminar that will unite education and cognitive psychology students to identify new research areas.
“At the end of the course, these students will write a grant proposal blending insights from the two different fields of education and neuroscience into new research,” he said.
Posted 10/01/09
