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0:00
♪ Ba dum ba dum ba da da dum ♪ ♪ Hang on, Sloopy. ♪ ♪ Sloopy, hang on. ♪ ♪ Ba dum ba dum ba da da dum ♪ ♪ Hang on, Sloopy. ♪ - Alright, good. Well, as Steve said, I'm here from Vanderbilt University to talk to you about educational neuroscience. And I understand that we may have a tornado later on today.
0:29
But I'm very familiar with tornadoes. We have lots of them in Nashville and of course, what's great about this room is that it's a tornado shelter. So we may be here a long, long time together. (laughing) So you may be just hearing me for hours and hours. No, I'm just kidding. I hear that it happens very rarely,
0:50
that tornadoes actually come to be here very rarely. Okay, so in terms of what is educational neuroscience, what is this field? In terms of thinking about the fundamentals of it, first of all, it combines neuroscience and education.
1:08
And it takes research on brain development and thinks about how that could be relevant to children's education. And then conversely, it takes educational research and thinks about how does environment shape brain development. Because of course the environment has a lot to do with how the brain develops. And the brain certainly is not developing in a vacuum.
1:34
And one thing that I want to point out right away is that it takes a really big team effort. So even with my collaborators here at Ohio State, we've worked on projects together and it takes a whole big slew of people. So the work that I'm showing you today is definitely not done by one person and takes a whole team to do it.
1:59
So in terms of techniques involved in educational neuroscience, there's lots of different things that we use to try to understand these brain-behavior relationships as related to education. So, one of which we do is just simple what we call paper-pencil testing. So what I mean by that is probably something all of you are familiar with, when you were in school or taking the SATs, or probably driver's tests, or something, where you have to actually answer questions,
2:28
you fill in bubbles, you click a button, or something like that. So that's what I mean by paper-pencil testing. And then we also use more experimental behavioral methods which are sort of more traditional psychology methods. And then there are animal models that people use. We don't in our research. But in terms of thinking about the breadth of educational neuroscience, there are animal models that are used. And one way this has actually had an influence, in terms of educational system,
3:00
is thinking about circadian rhythms. So if you think about, you've probably all heard that a lot of high schools either, I don't know if this is the case in Ohio, but in Tennessee, a lot of the high schools actually start later than the middle schools and elementary schools and that's because of some of the work that's been done on circadian rhythms in animal models.
3:22
And then of course, there's some genetics work that is done, including an animal model.
3:31
Turns out that animal model, like they all have reading problems because they can't read. The mice.
3:39
They actually do have an interesting mouse model of dyslexia. So, I'll be talking about dyslexia a little bit later. And then of course there's all different types of genetics work that is done, including lot's of work by my colleague Steve Petrill. And then, you think about interventions. So, when I'm talking about interventions, and I'm gonna show you some of that work today. I'm gonna be talking about academic interventions in this talk. So, thinking about if a child is struggling
4:10
to learn how to read or struggling with mathematics, what kind of interventions can you give them so that they get to be better and improve in their reading and math? But there's also some pharmacological interventions that people have either employed or are thinking about using in terms of improving academics and improving sort of the attention and focus of children in the educational environment.
4:38
And then finally, there's a tool, neuro-imaging tool that is used very widely in educational neuroscience to try to understand the cognition or thinking sort of underlying, what the brain is doing as people are performing tasks. So today what I'm going to be showing you mostly is results from both academic interventions as well as a lot of our neuro-imaging work. And some results from our experimental, psychological, and paper-pencil testing methods. So, how do we measure neurobiological
5:13
development in children?
5:16
So, what we do is we'll take those traditional paper-pencil tests or experimental psychology measures,
5:24
we take those and we marry them with measures of the brain. And there's a lot of different ways you can measure brain development and I'm gonna be showing you what those are. But, the most important thing, before we even get to the different types of ways that we can measure brain developments neurobiologically is telling you how. So, we use MRI technology in our studies which allows for mapping of brain structure and function. How many of you have been in a neuro imaging scanner before?
5:59
Okay, so a lot of you. So, it's an interesting environment in terms of thinking about a child going in there and trying to study what they're thinking or asking them to do things in there. So what you see here is you see a person lying down in the scanner. And what we do is we'll have them, for example if we want to measure their reading ability, for example, or their decision making ability, they'll be lying there in the scanner right here. And they'll be seeing things on a slide.
6:32
And then will have to make decisions about that. So, in the most simple sort of paradigm that we use in our research, someone will be lying here.
6:42
Someone a lot smaller usually 'cause we usually study children. Sometimes we study adults but a smaller person in there. And they actually like the scanner better than adults do. 'Cause I don't know about you, but when I go in an MRI scanner, I get really nervous 'cause I'm really claustrophobic. But the kids actually aren't usually quite as claustrophobic 'cause, of course, they are smaller so it doesn't seem quite so confined. But for this person here, for example,
7:08
if they were looking at words and were told they were either gonna be shown words sometimes or the could, would be show a blank screen, the most simple type of task would be that this person would be told press a button every time you see word. And so they would be lying there and they'd have a little button and they'd press that button and they'd press it every time they saw a word.
7:32
So that in the sort of the most simplistic form is how we measure brain function in terms of cognitive development in children.
7:42
So, there are different types of magnetic resonance imaging scans. The one that I am, the one that I just talked about is functional MRI.
7:53
And one thing that I didn't say a second ago, but you probably most of you in this audience know that is that one of the advantages of being able to do magnetic resonance imaging scans is that they are very noninvasive. So that there's something you can do with children that's not harmful. So you don't need to inject anything into anybody or anything like that.
8:16
So, functional MRI measures the activity when you're asking someone to make a decision or to look at something or do something when they're in the scanner.
8:29
And so that's what I mean by when we say task dependent. Another kind of scan is diffusion imaging which is thought to be sort of an indirect measure of white matter integrity and it's based on this idea of water diffusion. So this is a structural scan. So it's looking at white matter tracks in the brain. So it's not looking at what is happening while you're doing something. It's looking at what does your brain look like architecturally. Now we have another type of neuro-imaging scan
9:05
that also does the same type of thing that it captures structures in your brain and you can look at things like volume of certain parts of your brain. So these last two that I talked about right here, this one, the volumetric MRI and the diffusion imaging MRI, both of these are, if you compare it to different ways that we take pictures and videos, these are like still picture of the brain. So, the architecture of the brain, how big a certain part of the brain is
9:38
or where white matter tracts are going. This is more like taking a video where you're capturing actual activity as it happens. Most of what I'm gonna be showing you today is functional MRI. There's some others, there is some volumetric MRI that I'm gonna be showing you as well.
10:01
So, functional MRI has really opened up our understanding of how the brain is related to cognitive development and educational development in children. And so, there are many, many, many different functional MRI studies that have been done. But just to kind of give you a flavor of the types of things that people look at with functional MRI. So people look at things like what are differences between languages. So, in this study, Spanish language versus English language.
10:34
One of the questions that interests a lot of people is is there, are there universal language systems in the brain that allow us to speak or read,
10:46
or are there specific areas of the brain that are related to specific languages.
10:53
Another thing, another area that people study, this is my colleague Gavin Price at Vanderbilt, and this is some mathematics work that he's done on individuals who are typically developing in their math abilities and then those who really struggle or have what's called dyscalculia.
11:16
And then, this is some work by, by the imagining center here actually that just is in press as of, what was it Friday? Thursday? Something like that. So this is looking at reading, and something called executive function which we're gonna be talking about in a bit.
11:39
And then here's another study, this was a recent study of ours
11:46
that just came out looking at when kids are reading different types of texts, so when they're reading stories versus when they're having to learn new information. So this is just to give you a really a tiny, tiny snapshot sort of the types of things that people study using functional MRI.
12:04
So when we think about neuroscience and how it reveals things about education, I want to talk about four principles that are very relevant to neuroscience being integrated with studies of educational development.
12:21
So one of the things that's very important to know is that the brain changes over time.
12:28
You know, a long time ago, people kind of thought it was this static thing and didn't actually change, even the structure didn't really change that much. But, there are a lot of changes that are happening dynamically all the time in our brains.
12:44
Studying the brain can help reveal how brain systems work together. So not just like what's going on in this part of the brain, or that part of the brain, but how does this part of the brain talk to that part of the brain, for example.
12:58
Another thing is that not only does your brain change as your getting older,
13:04
but it also can change in very short time periods. So, for example, there's studies that show that over very, very short time periods, the brain can actually be modified. Over hours or even minutes, things, you can see changes in the brain.
13:22
And then there is an idea that is emerging in neuroscience.
13:29
This idea that the brain may be able to predict behavior better than behavior itself. So let me explain what I mean by that. So, when we have children in kindergarten, for example, before they start reading, many children don't know how to read in kindergarten. But, so if we wanna think about how do we predict the children in, when they come into kindergarten, and they're not reading, how do we predict which children are going to be struggling in first grade with reading?
14:01
Or struggling in first grade with math? Before they're even taught how to read or do math. And that can be very helpful to know that because you may be able to say, okay, well, if Johnny and Suzy, but not Sally, are gonna have trouble learning how to read or trouble with math development, then we're gonna intervene with Johnny and Suzy ahead of Sally.
14:28
Did I mix up those names? - [Audience] No. (laughing) - No, okay. So, anyway, so that can be really helpful to know. And in the past what we've always done, is we've done things like say, the best example is if anybody has a kindergartener or family member who's going into kindergarten, one of the most classic things that people do when people are about to enter kindergarten is they say, they test them on how may letters they know. And how many letters a child knows when they start kindergarten
15:03
is a pretty good predictor of how well their reading is, their reading skills are gonna develop. But it's not a perfect predictor. And so one of the things that people have started looking at, is that rather than looking at behavioral methods, like how many letters do you know, or how well could you write your name, or how many numbers do you know, things like that. They looked at whether measures of the brain itself can tell us something about whether somebody's
15:31
gonna be struggling to read in the future. And I'm gonna be showing you some work on that as we go on.
15:40
So in terms of principle number one, the brain changes over time, I'm gonna be showing you a recent study of ours where we looked at brain changes over time. And this is just looking at how big the value of different brain structures. And so this is just to kind of give you a general flavor of how things can change over time.
16:04
So what you're seeing here is you're seeing how brain volume changes over time.
16:19
I'm not gonna tell you what happens after 55. (laughing)
16:25
Actually, we have this data set and we have people that are actually 95 years old, but it is interesting sort of what happens after 55. But this is just sort of a more general sort of flavor of helping you understand sort of the dynamic changes that really happen over time.
16:43
So in terms of principles number two through four, I'm gonna be using reading as an exemplar to talk to you about how the brain, how brain systems work together, how it can change in short periods of time, and then this whole issue that I was talking about. Can you use the brain to actually predict outcomes later on that are better predicted than things like how many letters do you know when you start kindergarten?
17:11
So to give you a sense of how I'm gonna tackle these addressing principles two through four, I'm first gonna give you just an overview of reading processes and kind of orient you to reading development and what happens as kids learn how to read and what happens when kids are struggling to read. And then I'm gonna talk about in parts two and three different parts of reading development and both, again, both kids who are strong and develop those skills well versus kids who struggle.
17:42
And then in part four, I'm gonna be talking about that last principle. About whether the brain can predict outcomes better than other things like paper-pencil testing. And then I'll summarize and have future directions and get a chance to go I guess eat and things like that upstairs, right? As long as there's not a tornado. Just kidding.
18:06
Okay, so why are reading skills important?
18:11
Literacy skills, as it turns out, are associated a myriad of different outcomes. There of course associated with educational attainment. So it's hard to graduate from college, graduate from high school if you are struggling to read 'cause it's really a gateway into learning, being a lifelong learner.
18:32
But it also can have a lot of impact in terms of your employment.
18:37
Increasingly, individuals need to have more and more reading and literacy skills in terms of employment, which is sort of interesting 'cause if we think about the internet, you would think that might be the opposite actually. But when you look at different reports, they actually suggest that people need more advanced degrees, which of course requires more reading, as time has gone on. And then, of course, those two things, educational and employment opportunities
19:04
feed right into economic opportunities. And then there's this last issue of health. Which is a really critical one 'cause you know a lot of times the instructions you get from physicians are very complicated. And there are some individuals in society who really, that is relatively basic literacy skill to be able to read what you need to do in terms of health, taking care of your health. But, there are individuals who, and not a trivial in number of individuals,
19:39
who struggle even with that level of literacy.
19:43
But, this is probably all better said by Dr. Seuss. "The more that you read, "The more things you will know. "The more that you learn, "The more places you will go."
19:55
So, here's the thing. Probably for a lot of you, you learned how to read really easily, you don't even really remember how to read, how you started reading. I started reading when I was three and one of my sons did, the other one didn't. He's kinda struggled to learn how to read.
20:14
So, it's variable. And for some kids, I was just talking with somebody, I can't remember where they are. I can't see you right now. But we were just talking about how for some kids learning to read is really sort of magical and they just all of the sudden one day start reading. And they've got it. But then there are other kids who really struggle with it. And, I wonder if one of them was either John Steinbeck or somebody in John Steinbeck's family.
20:42
Because he has two very interesting quotes that I'm gonna show you. "Learning to read is probably the most difficult "and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain "and if you don't believe that, "watch an illiterate adult try to do it." And that really is true. It is a very, a very humbling experience to try to teach somebody to read who is struggling to learn to read or cannot read.
21:08
And then this one. "Some people there are who, being grown; "forget the horrible task of learning to read. "It is perhaps the greatest single effort "that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child." So there's probably about 25%, you know, the estimates vary based on different definitions and different studies. There's probably about 25% of kids who really, really, really do struggle and probably feel exactly how this quote,
21:38
exactly how this quote is being conveyed. Do any of you know anybody who's either struggling to learn how to read or struggled to learn how to read?
21:48
Yeah. I can never go anywhere without running into somebody who says, "Oh, I have a cousin" or "I struggled to learn how to read when I was growing up." Things like that. So it is pretty common difficulty.
22:04
So, here's the thing. A lot of people, like I just said, struggle to read. And this is reflected in our National Assessment of Education Progress. So this, for those of you who may not be familiar with this, this is a test that's a nationwide test so it doesn't necessarily, it gets around the issues of different states having different ways that they measure things. So this is given to everybody in the United States.
22:32
And what you see here is how we've been doing in reading across time as a nation. And these are the people who have, being proficient means you're able, you're where you should be. And this is based on fourth graders, but the percentages are about the same for eighth graders and twelfth graders. And so here you can see we only have 36% of individuals who are either just where they should be or beyond that. And 31% are reading at a basic level and 32% are reading below basic.
23:07
And let me tell you, when you look at the questions that you're asked in terms of a below basic level, they're very, very basic questions. So, not being, being at the below basic level is a pretty significant thing. Those are the people who are gonna probably be struggling to read and follow doctors' orders, for example.
23:31
So how do children get to be skilled readers? And what can go wrong?
23:36
Behaviorally, we know many of the characteristics of skilled readers. Skilled readers have really strong vocabularies. They are able to make inferences and integrate into existing background knowledge. So, just like right now what you're doing, whatever you know about reading and the brain and language development and child development. You're probably, well hopefully you're learning some new things in here. But, you know, we're learning some new things and you're integrating that
24:04
into your existing knowledge of what you know about those topics.
24:10
And that the same thing happens when you're reading. So, good readers are able to employ strategies such as visualizing and organizing and summarizing what has been read. They're able to monitor themselves. So we've all had the experience where you're reading and reading and reading and all of the sudden you realize I just read like five pages and I wasn't paying attention at all. I have no idea what that said. And you have to go back and reread again, right?
24:35
So that's a characteristics of a good reader is actually monitoring that, that you didn't actually sort of comprehend everything that you just finished reading. And then one of the most important things that readers have to do is the very thing, very first bullet point, which is being able to recognize words accurately and fluently. So that's the biggest hallmark of a beginning reader who's gonna be either proficient or be a struggling reader is whether they can recognize and sound out words.
25:06
And I'm gonna be showing you some examples of that. But that is very important skill that beginning readers have to master.
25:14
So, I'm just gonna represent much of what I just said
25:18
graphically and present it in this, in this illustration. So this is a illustration of reading and all the different things that go into reading. It's by my colleague Hollis Scarborough. And I just love this graphic 'cause I think it's very easily understood and sort of gives you a nice vision in your head. And so I'm gonna go through what this is. So this represents what's called the simple view of reading. So the simple view of reading says that if you have individuals,
25:54
how well an individual can recognize words and sound out words, if you measure that and then you measure how well they're able to understand oral language, and if you measure those two things together, you're gonna have a pretty good prediction of how well, they're gonna be able to, how good they're gonna be overall at their reading skills. So let me explain what I mean by this word recognition part. So if I'm good at this word recognition part, I can recognize and sound out words.
26:24
So, it doesn't necessarily mean that I can understand things, that I'm a skilled reader and can understand everything. But it does mean that I can sound out things. So, for example, I'm very good at word recognition in Spanish. I can sound out and read Spanish really well.
26:40
Do I understand it if somebody reads it to me? No. So therefore, I don't understand, I can't, when I'm reading Spanish it may sound great if I read it out loud, but I have no idea what I just finished reading. So, this language comprehension is the component of reading where if I read a text to you, that's how well you can understand it. So that's what I mean by language comprehension. So in the case that I just talked about, I had really poor language comprehension of Spanish
27:14
but I had pretty good word recognition. And so there are people that are good at one part of this or the other. In order to be a skilled reader, you need to be good at both parts. And then, of course, this rope is representing that there's all these different strands are representing that within these two very big areas of language comprehension and word recognition, there's lots of different things that make up those skills. So if you're able to understand somebody,
27:41
if you're able to understand a story, you're probably integrating what you know about background knowledge about that story, you're integrating the words you're hearing, what they mean. So those are all things that you need to be able to understand a story if somebody's reading it to you. And then there's other skills that you need to have to be able to recognize words on the page. And we're gonna be talking about those a little bit later. But the important point is that these are sort of
28:06
two broad areas and they predict level of confidence in reading and how well you're gonna be able to comprehend. You can have problems in either strand or in both.
28:19
So in terms of the importance of this bottom level, this bottom level in the rope slide that I'm showing you, this is a very critical area in terms of beginning reading. And what research is showing is the difficulties at this level cascade to poor reading comprehension. So if you're a child and you struggle to sound out words on a page, you're gonna have trouble understanding what they mean because you're not able to do the basic part of sounding out the words.
28:55
So it turns out that a lot of children, about 10%, struggle with learning how to sound out or decode words, that bottom strand. So, if you gave them, this is a very traditional and relatively simple task, but if you give them fake words, which I'm gonna show you in a second. If you give them fake words that force them to have to sound out, they can't just recognize them by memory, but they have to sound them out, they'll have trouble with this type of task.
29:23
So, if I asked a child who had dyslexia to sound out these words that I'm showing you, they would have a lot of trouble sounding them out. And that's because they're not able to apply sound-symbol relationships to what they're reading. They're not able to say, "Oh, I know that O-As,
29:47
"that those letters O-A right there make the long O sound. "Joap. "Or that this E at the end means "that this I should be pronounced I and not eh."
30:01
So what does word level processing generally look like in the brain? This is a pretty gross model that I'm showing you, but it gives you flavor of what's going on in the brain. So, there's three big areas in the left hemisphere that generally are associated with being able to recognize words, that bottom strand. There's a temporoparietal area, which is though to be important for mapping those letters to sounds. So that representation of cementing sounds with letters.
30:35
And then there's a frontal area, which I'm not gonna actually talk about too much today.
30:41
And then there's this left occipitotemporal region, which is thought to be important for memory based word identification. And this area in particular is really important for word recognition. You're see this, you're gonna see me refer to this area a lot during the talk. So, just kinda try to tuck it away in your brain.
31:03
But this is the area where the, if you put an adult in the scanner whose a skilled reader, you're gonna see that area light up. If you show them words in the scanner, that areas gonna light up.
31:16
And, it also correlates with how well you're able to do things, like sound out words, like those fake words that I just showed you. So this is a very important area. And as individuals get older, you tend to see a consolidation from more diffuse activation around the brain to more focal activation in this left occipitotemporal region.
31:44
So, this left occipitotemporal area, it turns out, is a really important area, like I said, for word recognition. But, as you would imagine, it's also an area that shows anomalous findings for individuals who struggle with that word level part of reading. And as I mentioned earlier, those individuals that struggle with that bottom strand, that word level part, are individuals with dyslexia. And what I'm showing you here is a study that we did in 2013, but there's lots and lots of other people
32:19
who've done these studies and have shown the exact same findings. And what this, what this study shows you is that if you take how active this area is, you take the signal from this area after showing individuals words, in this case it was children who were 10 to 14 years old. And you show them words in the scanner and then you look at how this area and how active it is. You'll see that individuals who have dyslexia have lower activation in this left occipitotemporal region
32:51
as compared to individuals who are typically developing readers. So, and you see that finding over and over and over and over and over again. That study, that finding has been shown by many different studies.
33:04
However, this is gonna become a little bit, this is gonna become important for the next segment of the talk. Not every child, not every person who is a poor reader shows this anomaly in this left occipitotemporal region. So I just showed you the individuals with dyslexia as compared to those who are typically developing readers, okay? You definitely can see a nice big difference between these two in terms of how active they are.
33:33
There's another type of reading problem called specific reading comprehension disorder. And individuals with specific reading comprehension disorder have problems with the upper strand. So, remember I told you that's the part where if you read a story to somebody, that's like, so that specific reading comprehension disorder is like me reading Spanish. So these individuals can read words really well on a page, but they can't put them together and make meaning out of them.
34:03
So, what does this tell us? This tells us that there are these readers that show perfectly normal activation in this area. And so that tells us that there's some other things that we need to look for in the brain that are related to reading skill. So in this next part, I'm gonna be talking to you about findings beyond the word level in terms of comprehension.
34:33
So, despite the importance of word-level processing, it doesn't fully explain reading comprehension performance, particularly as children get older.
34:42
So the things that we often look for are areas in that upper strand that I just was talking to you about, as well as something called executive function. How many of you have heard that term executive function before? Okay, so a lot of you. So executive function refers to your ability to inhibit things that you want to say. It also refers to things like working memory. So, if you go to the store, and, you know, you forget your, you don't write down what you're gonna get at the store,
35:12
but you say to yourself, "Okay, it was bananas, eggs, chocolate, milk."
35:20
And then you get to the store, you know you kinda have to keep that alive in your mind until you get to the store so that you don't forget. So that's an example of working memory. And then shifting, or cognitive flexibility, so your ability to kinda shift from one thing to the next, one cognitive task to the next. This is another definition, "a family of [effortful] top-down processes needed when you "have to concentrate and pay attention, "when 'going on automatic' or relying on instinct
35:47
"or intuition would be ill-advised, "insufficient, or impossible."
35:53
So this is something, this is an area of cognition that is develops over time and tends to keep developing in children. And, the areas of the brain that are associated with executive function is this network called the fronto-parietal network. What I actually want you to pay attention to is this frontal area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is sort of the seat of this ability to sort of be cognitively flexible, to keep things in your memory, and things like that.
36:29
So, executive function has role in predicting the outcomes of reading.
36:37
And I'm gonna actually skip this for right now and just show you this, sort of how this fits in. At least how we conceptualize it fitting in with this rope strand. So the idea is that you have the top strand and the bottom strand as we've talked about. But then there's this third area, executive function, which we have hypothesized helps sort of intertwine all these different skills together. So this plays sort of an important role in kind of helping these different skills intertwine together.
37:12
And so, I'm just gonna jump ahead a little bit here in terms of time.
37:20
One of the things that we've done with our reading work is try to understand what it means, what the brain is doing, when we're asking it to just read words, not necessarily garner meaning from them. But just read words sort of out of context versus comprehend things or learn from what somebody's reading. So this is an example of one of the things that we do. Remember I told you when you're doing a functional MRI scan, you'll show people things? You'll be lying down and you'll show people
37:54
things on the computer screen? So each of these represents what would be seen on a computer screen for an individual who's lying on the scanner. So in this one, what you're seeing is a passage about hydroponics. Hydroponics is a funny word for plants, for plants growing without soil. And then they'd see another sentence that has to do with hydroponics. So the whole entire thing is about hydroponics. Here are some words you see don't actually make any sense when they're put together.
38:26
And so the idea is that we're trying to kind of capture basic reading processes that bottom strand where you're just recognizing words versus the entire thing that you have to do when you're reading which is comprehend and understand and read words altogether to learn from them.
38:44
And so, what you see is you see that much of the areas that are associated with comprehending passages or learning about hydroponics and reading about hydroponics overlaps a lot with when you're just reading those isolated words. So, what this is showing you is that for both of these two things, when you look at these two things,
39:10
that much of the activation that you see is overlapping. But the yellow are all areas which are unique to when you have to actually comprehend and understand what you're reading.
39:26
So, the main point is not so much all the intricacies of where this activation is happening, so on and so forth. What I really wanted you to take home from this is that in addition to many of these areas which are language related, so all of these areas right here are very known to be very much related to language as well as reading,
39:47
there's also areas that are associated with executive function. So, if you look at, this is the blue that I showed you earlier, that's associated with this higher level skills of working memory and inhibition and shifting your attention, that overlaps a lot with reading comprehension. So, where you see the fuchsia is areas where executive function and reading comprehension overlap with each other. So I find what I'm trying to illustrate by this is
40:16
to say this cognitive process of executive function is related to reading comprehension. Okay. So, where does this come in as important? Where this comes in as important, this is a very complicated slide, but there's only sort of one point that I want to get across with it that will matter for the next part of the talk.
40:39
So what I'm showing you here is I'm showing you that when this area of executive function, this area, this fuchsia area right here, when that area of executive function is, when that signal increases while individuals are reading, what's happening in other places of the brain is that there are two different areas, that left occipitotemporal area, which I told you about so much earlier that's really important for memory based word identification, it helps areas that are important
41:10
for reading and language coordinate with each other. So basically as this is getting more active, these two areas are working together. So what that suggests is that this executive function thing, this executive function skill may play an important part in helping other parts of the brain work together. And that's the point that I wanted to make sure that you understood. So this executive function area of the brain seems to be important for facilitating other areas of the brain to work together.
41:47
So why might that be important? So, we're gonna shift gears a little bit to the very last part of the talk, where I'm gonna be talking to you about intervention. Remember I told you that we wanted to talk about whether academics could actually be predicted by, academic development, could that be predicted by brain development. So in this study, we looked at that very question.
42:16
So when you look at individuals who receive reading instruction, who are poor readers, if you remember, I showed you earlier and I said that there are individuals who are poor readers tend to have less activation in this left occipitotemporal area, right? You remember that?
42:40
So this I'm showing you the same thing essentially that I showed you before. So these are good readers and you see some nice activation in all the areas that I showed, that I told you was associated with that bottom strand. And these are poor readers, and you don't see as much activation. Well, it turns out, if you give really good academic intervention reading instruction to these poor readers, these individuals who have a dyslexia profile,
43:06
if you give them really tailored, specific instruction, the brain will change and after reading instruction, they get better at reading, but they also at the same time, their activation patterns start to look a lot more like typically developing readers. Okay? So, this illustrates one of the principles that we were talking about. That the brain can change in very short time periods.
43:36
But, studies also suggest that the brains of those who respond versus don't respond to reading intervention may have differences before intervention that predicts intervention response. And so you remember I told you the importance of this left occipitotemporal area, I told you you were gonna hear about this a lot. And so if we look at this area, and we ask the question what does this area look like in individuals who end up being able to respond to instruction if they're poor readers,
44:09
what does this area look like before they even start instruction?
44:14
And it turns out that if you look at individuals who are able to eventually respond to intervention versus those who do not, these individuals are all individuals with dyslexia in these two different columns right here that I'm showing you. These are individuals with dyslexia, these are individuals who are good readers. What I'm showing you, it's just a different angle, but what I'm showing you is this left occipitotemporal region. Okay? And what I'm showing you
44:44
is that this is what the individual, the individuals' brains look like before they receive instruction. So these are all kids who come in, then these two groups of kids are kids who come in as struggling readers. They have dyslexia. And when looking at what does their brain look like before we give them reading instruction? And can we predict who's gonna respond to reading instruction versus who's not just by their brain profile? And so, what you see here is that you see some nice activation
45:15
in that left occipitotemporal area in individuals who are typically developing readers.
45:21
But individuals who end up being able to respond to the reading instruction have more activation in here before they even start reading instruction versus those who are non responders. So, they're not able to respond to reading instruction.
45:37
So, you see differences in those activations.
45:41
And, what the most important point that I want to get across is that, remember we were talking about that executive function area before? It turns out that in individuals who are able to respond to reading instruction, that executive function area, and you don't worry about all the complexity of this slide, but that executive function area plays a role in individuals who are able to respond to reading instruction. Such that as the executive function area's
46:12
becoming more active, you see more coordination between language and reading areas. And it turns out that this is actually a very strong predictor of who's gonna respond to intervention versus not. So, it's a very powerful predictor what individual's brains are coordinating and how well they're able to use that executive function skill is a pretty strong,
46:36
is a pretty strong predictor of whose gonna be able to respond to intervention.
46:43
Okay. So, I think I'm just gonna go ahead, because we're getting close to the time, right? So I think I'll go ahead and just summarize what we've talked about. So we talked about there's four different principles of educational neuroscience. So, the first one was that the brain changes over time. So you saw how brain volume in this case was changing over time from five to 55. And we didn't talk about what happens after 55, remember? And then the brain can help reveal how systems work together.
47:19
So I showed you some different findings on that. How the executive function systems were,
47:25
how different language areas were coordinating together as executive function systems became more active. We also talked about how the brain can change over short time periods and that studies have shown that the brain changes can change quite rapidly if given something like academic intervention, for example.
47:45
And then finally, we talked about how the brain may be able to predict better than behavior itself. So in this particular study, it did a much better job of predicting who was gonna respond to intervention versus who was not then any of the paper-pencil testing that we had. So how well these language and reading and executive function systems were coordinating together was a great predictor of who was going to respond to intervention.
48:12
So, the implications of this work are potentially can we predict very early who will be at risk for reading difficulties and possibly math difficulties long before trouble arises?
48:26
We will know who won't respond. The advantages of this could be that we will know who won't respond long before starting a certain intervention approach. So if we go back to like Johnny and Sally who were struggling, we might find that Johnny needs this approach versus Sally needs that approach. And instead of wasting our time with, you know, giving Johnny approach A and realizing, oh, approach A doesn't work and then doing B and saying, "Oh, okay, B works," we could start right with approach B.
48:57
One of the questions though is whether these measures will ever be better than the many things we already know that are good predictors. We talked in the beginning how letter knowledge is a really good predictor when you walk into the kindergarten classroom. It's a great predictor of how well somebody's gonna learn how to read. So we know lots of things about early prediction of reading, one of which actually that we didn't talk about was family risk. If you have somebody in your family
49:23
who struggled to learn how to read, that child is going to be at a much higher risk for learning, to struggle to learn how to read as well.
49:33
None of these predict perfectly, but the hope is is that educational neuroscience will allow for more tailored interventions and earlier identification. So that's sort of the golden, the holy grail that educational neuroscience is going after is sort of how do you tailor interventions and use the brain and neuroscience to predict academic interventions. And before I close, I just wanna acknowledge the funding sources that we use to do much of this work that I've talked to you about.
50:05
And then thank, a big shout out to thank you to all the students and the many collaborators that we have. We have so many collaborators that can't really put all of them on a slide but I wanted to make sure that I at least acknowledge the fact that we have so many students and collaborators who helped do this work. And as I mentioned in the beginning, it definitely does not happen on one person, well, with one person alone, it takes a big team effort.
50:32
So with that, I will close and take questions. (audience clapping)
50:43
- [Man] I ask you to go ahead and take your own questions, but please repeat the questions so that people in the room can hear you. - Mm-hmm.
50:50
Yes. - [Woman] Okay, how do you incorporate some of the external factors like environment and family,
51:00
not only the family risk but also nutrition and violence or whatever into this find?
51:08
- So that's a great question. So the question was how do we incorporate environment into thinking about all these different findings and results that I showed you? And in many of these findings, we actually were controlled for family environment. Sort of controlled for things like differences in socioeconomic status and sort of like how much different family income, differential family income, and things like that. But there's a whole area of research in our lab
51:38
that actually looks at very specifically those questions on how does a family environment, how does literacy environment, how much the kids read to their children, what kind of interventions they get at school, and things like that. How does that influence the shaping of the brain? And it has a huge influence as you can probably imagine.
52:03
Very, very large influence, especially on executive function. The socioeconomic status has a huge impact on the development of those frontal lobe executive function areas, the ones that I showed you in blue, has a very large impact on those areas.
52:21
Yes? - [Man] Just curious about your thoughts on the next steps? It's really inexpensive and easy to ask Johnny how many letters he knows versus running him through an MRI machine, right? So how do you practically implement to get to the knowledge that you need to intervene differently? - Right. So this question was an excellent one and one that I was alluding to in the very last slide. So, what the question was is that how do you sort of reconcile the fact
52:48
that you have these really inexpensive predictors of how many letters do you know versus like sticking somebody in an MRI machine? So there's two things that I would say about that. First, we are definitely far away from being able to use somebody's individual brain to be able to say this what you're gonna benefit from or not benefit from.
53:11
But I do think that with the advancement of technology that we may either get there, so that the precision level is so much better than something like family risk or how many letters do you know, that it end up being worth it and less expensive in the end because you're able to intervene, you know, earlier the right way. That's sort of, like I said, that's like the dream, right? Of being able to use the brain indices that way. Another way that is probably more short term realistic,
53:43
and by short term, I mean in like the next five to 10 years, I think the individual brain prediction is gonna be further out than that. But is being able to say, okay, we got better prediction from these brain measures, so let's see now if we can figure out how to develop cheaper paper-pencil behavior, paper-pencil indices that actually capture just as well as the brain did. So that's sort of where I see it as sort of being iterative and then maybe one day we'll get to to where
54:14
A getting an MRI is much less expensive, much more portable, so on, so forth and much more precise. But until it's precise at the individual level, I think you're absolutely right. It's not something that's a right now kind of thing. - [Man] Use an iPhone app. (laughing) - What did you say? - [Man] We'll get an MRI iPhone app. (laughing)
54:39
- [Woman] Executive function is critical to this process. What are the ways that we can improve executive function? What interventions do we have for that? - Yeah, that's a great question. So that is actually one of the big questions that we're trying to address in that award that Steve Petrill was talking about that we just got that's a little bit longer than typical NIH awards. Seeing a short, very short answer to your, oh, I'm sorry I didn't repeat the question.
55:12
The question was how do we improve, can, are there interventions for executive function? To improve executive function? And the very short answer is that most studies that try to like improve working memory, for example, improve working memory, but what they don't improve is the things that are associated with executive function like reading skills or math skills, which are really the things that, that's really why you'd wanna improve executive function, right? And so, that's an area that
55:46
we're trying to figure out right now. Our hypothesis is that actually it's this issue of having
55:54
the brain work together with executive function systems. So this is, that left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex area, so our hypothesis is that this area really needs to work with other areas of the brain that are important for like that specific process, in this case reading. But there's other areas that are important for things like math. But the executive function system needs to come in. And that's how, so that's the nut that we have to crack
56:22
is how do you improve executive function in the context of whatever you're trying to improve it for. Does that make sense?
56:31
So, it's very unsatisfactory, that answer. Sorry.
56:35
Maybe a tornado will come in and save me or something.
56:41
Yes.
56:44
- [Woman] I'm curious if there's a similar line of study for people with traumatic brain injuries, adults maybe, where there's imaging that might predictor whether or not they're gonna be responsive to PT, occupational therapy, speech therapy, that kind of thing?
56:59
- Yes, there is. Oh, do I still need to repeat the question if it's-- - [Woman] Or did everyone here me? - No? Okay. So, yes, there are definitely a lot of studies looking at
57:13
using neuroimaging to try to understand more about traumatic brain injury and particular like mild traumatic brain injury and how that, how, what kind of predictors can we find that'll help us understand whether somebody with a seemingly mild traumatic brain injury is gonna actually have more major versus minor effects, because those aren't as well predicted. I don't know a whole lot about traumatic brain injuries, it's not, you know, my area of study, but I do know that people are working that,
57:44
particularly that issue of mild TBI because it's been an area that's been ignored but of course is highly relevant for individuals who are playing high school sports and things like that, among many other things.
58:01
(energetic band music)
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