Lab News

Media:

Healthy Cities: Aging in the Cities Talk 

(January 18th 2022)

If you missed the Aging in the City panel organized by Dean Carol Payne, please feel free to watch it here. I talked about cognitive reserve and bilingualism, Dr. Kathleen Van Benthem talked about expertise in pilots and drivers, and Dr. Bruce Wallace talked about using smart home technology to support patients and caregivers with dementia. The event was moderated by Dr. Chris Herdman who provided a wonderful overall introduction and helped the entire event run smoothly.

Lab Meetings: Fridays at 1:00 PM

On Friday, January 28th at 1:00 PM we are delighted to be hosting Dr. Sibylla Leon Guerrero, please contact Dr. Anderson if you would like to join us (on Zoom) to hear Dr. Leon Guerrero's talk. Dr. Guerrero's talk is titled "Functional and Structural Correlates of Language Experience in Spanish-English Bilingual Adolescents".


Functional and Structural Correlates of Language Experience in Spanish-English Bilingual Adolescents

The lifelong experience of bilingualism in adults is associated with neural adaptations that vary according to a bilingual’s age of second language acquisition, proficiency, and/or usage context. Neural activity shapes the brain’s structure over time, as seen in concomitant results in functional measures of language (e.g. Nichols & Joanisse, 2016) and cognitive (e.g., Mamiya et al., 2018) processing and structural measures of white matter fibers. However, whether and how functional and structural changes emerge before adulthood is less understood. In this talk, I will present data from joint functional and structural connectivity measures taken with adolescent Spanish-English bilinguals living in the U.S. during a naturalistic educational video paradigm. Consistent with prior findings with adults, children’s functional and structural connectivity measures were associated with their age of second language acquisition and proficiency; however, function and structure also diverged in important ways that will be discussed in the talk.


Bio: I am currently an NIH postdoctoral fellow at UC, Irvine working with Drs. Judith Kroll and Elizabeth Peña, as well as visiting fellow at Harvard University. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach across education, psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how early bilingual and bidialectal language experience shape later language and literacy development.


On Friday the 26th of November we hosted Dr. Brianna Yamasaki 

Dr. Yamasaki gave an excellent presentation on second language reading skill and bilingualism. Thank you Dr. Yamasaki for sharing your research with us and facilitating such a wonderful discussion! Please see here for more details about Dr. Yamasaki's presentation.

Incoming Students (Welcome!)

TBA

Awards/Achievements/New Papers

Bilingualism contributes to reserve and working memory efficiency: Evidence from structural and functional neuroimaging

Published in Neuropsycholgia. 7, and here for access to the full paper.

Coordinate-Based Network Mapping of Brain Structure in Major Depressive Disorder in Younger and Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Click here for a tweet summary and here for a link to the article.

Upcoming Talks: