The Educational Neuroscience Lab explores questions at the intersection of education and neuroscience, in the emerging field of Educational Neuroscience. Our research examines the neural underpinnings of cognitive processes that are relevant for education, and the role of educational experiences and enculturation as primary drivers of brain plasticity to create the neural circuits that underlie human specific abilities. Our research combines the latest technological advances in understanding the human brain as a “learning organ” with insights from cognitive psychology and education to help build the emerging field of educational neuroscience.
The lab focuses on three main areas:
1) the acquisition of mathematics in typical and atypically developing populations
2) the role of multi-sensory integration in learning; and
3) the role of learning in synesthesia, and the consequences of synesthesia for education.
My initial training was in the methods and theories of cognitive science and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley (BA) and the University of California, San Diego (MA and PhD). I then held a post-doctoral appointment at INSERM in France where I used methods of cognitive neuroscience (including functional MRI and EEG) to explore the neural basis of numerical and mathematical abilities, especially the mental number line, in typically developing adults. Inspired by the idea that the neural circuits we observed in adults were the result of a lifetime of educational experiences I took a second post-doc at Vanderbilt University, where I examined how the earliest stages of formal mathematics education shape brain circuits as children begin to link Arabic number symbols with their underlying quantity semantics during the early school years (K-3rd grade).
