This year’s neurodevelopmental disorders seminar was held at the University of Oxford on 22nd June. It was a really well organised and enjoyable day. I was eager to attend the seminar day as it covers a diverse range of interesting topics that can be applied to many areas of neurodevelopmental research, prompting interesting discussions, particularly with regards to future directions.
This was my first visit to Oxford too. I got a nice glimpse of the city during a walk in the sunshine
There were two parallel sessions running throughout the day. I
found some of the talks particularly interesting; Dr Sam Wass talked about executive
function training early in infants’ development. The notion of targeting
training very early in development is important in situations when it may be possible
to train certain skills early on to support the child’s subsequent development.
Such studies involve a number of obvious challenges relating to the practical difficulties
of training skills or strategies in infants, and cognitive training is rarely
focused on young infants so far. However, clever task designs can be used that
do not require verbal or touch response. For instance, training children through
providing rewarding stimuli (e.g., via visual salience) to encourage and direct
eye movements and thus attention to
certain components of the screen. The earlier one can intervene and attempt to address
problem areas or enhance abilities, the more room there may be for potential positive
knock on effects. Often in children with Down syndrome, the gap between them
and their typically developing peers in cognitive performance widens over the
course of development, so where it is feasible to attempt to enhance or train
in infancy, it seems very positive to do so to support subsequent development. Relating this back to
the DSL+ project, we are carrying out our vocabulary intervention when children
start school at age 6. Once children start school there will be greater
requirements for using their vocabulary and they will need new “academic” words
in their vocabulary to support them in their school education.
A point was
also raised about transfer effects, and the importance of hypotheses regarding
where we would expect to see transfer effects, but also where we do not expect
to see transfer effects. In a sense, this allows us to use training studies not
only to directly improve the areas that we are training, but also as a form of
basic science, i.e., as a useful route to teach us about the areas and
processes that we are attempting to train.
Another
talk that I found very interesting was by Dr Faye Smith, who discussed research
on the consolidation of new vocabulary, this was specifically regarding
children with dyslexia, but the key point was that regardless of their dyslexia
and the different sleep patterns that tend to be experienced in this group,
there remains a key role of sleep consolidation for learning. Again, relating
this to our research, those with Down syndrome often have non-typical sleep
patterns and some difficulties sleeping, but it is important that we take into
consideration the important role of consolidation when we focus on children’s
acquisition of new vocabulary items, as this may well play a strong role in
children’s ability to learn the words. Allowing children to learn words on day
one, and return the following day to re-familiarise themselves with the words, and
to have repetition in the intervention over the course of multiple days is therefore
an important component.
Another
area that I felt had relevance to the DSL+ was a talk given by Dr Mary Hanley
regarding classroom visual distraction in children with autism. The children
with autism were particularly drawn to visual displays behind a teachers face. It is important to consider not only the
components included directly in the training materials, but also to consider
the broader learning environment and the impact that this environment has on
learning. With regards to visual distractions, this is something that we have
thought carefully about in the design of the iPad tasks themselves. Of course,
certain visual materials and colours can be aesthetically pleasing, but it is
important that while material needs to engage the child, the visual information
and backgrounds are not distracting and deterring children’s focus away from
the learning task at hand. Other issues that are not controlled within the
training tasks themselves, but rather involving the surrounding training
environment may be important too. Clear instructions to teachers with examples
of how to interact with the child to maintain their attention to the task at
hand may be important to think about as well.
The final keynote talk from Prof. Dorothy Bishop was particularly engaging. A number of important issues to consider in this area of research were covered, among other things, the large variations from one child to the next in any group of individuals affected by a given neurodevelopmental disorder. This was also an important recurring point raised throughout the day, and is always an important consideration when attempting to study any given group.
Understanding group commonalities is extremely helpful,
for instance, being aware that, at the group level, there is a common tendency
for individuals with Down syndrome to experience weaknesses in areas such as
verbal short-term memory, or expressive vocabulary. This helps us to devise
specific interventions for those with certain disorders, and for instance in
our intervention, to have an awareness of the heightened difficulties that we
are likely to observe for many children with Down syndrome when we attempt to
include expressive vocabulary tasks in our intervention (this can allow us to
devise tasks in clever ways to help children overcome specific difficulties).
However, individual differences are also very useful to be aware of, and are
very informative regarding the neurodevelopmental disorders being studied. For
example, not all children with Down syndrome have specific verbal short-term
memory difficulties; understanding why there are some exceptions is important.
In addition, awareness of individual differences can prevent us from attempting
to apply one set of rules to an entire group of individuals. For our means, an
element of flexibility is required in our intervention to allow for the
inevitable scale of individual differences across children. For example, we are
designing tasks in which children can respond verbally, or can respond with
alternative forms of communication such as symbol or sign use where this is the
only way for them to communicate and engage.
This
seminar series really sparks a lot of important thoughts and discussion
regarding methodology and theory that applies to various aspects of
neurodevelopmental disorders research. Thanks to the organisers for a great
day!
- Written by Liz Smith -
