Please join us for the following talk in room G26, 7 George Square. The link to the online Teams meeting will be sent to the mailing list closer to the time for those who cannot join us in Edinburgh.

Speaker

Time and date

October 21st, 2 PM.

Title and abstract

Abstract concepts like “fraud” and “inflation”, detached from concrete physical experience, are crucial for advanced reasoning and the exploration of phenomena beyond immediate sensory perceptions. These concepts are typically learned during middle childhood in rich, dynamic face-to-face communication with more knowledgeable people, such as caregivers and teachers. Thus, learning abstract concepts is a fundamentally social and embodied process. Recent advances in neuroimaging, particularly fNIRS hyperscanning, enable the study of such interactive, social language learning in more naturalistic contexts. Adopting an embodied approach to social neuroscience, we investigate how verbal and non-verbal behavioral coordination and brain-to-brain synchronisation that occur in interactive dyads of caregivers and children support the learning of abstract concepts. In a multimodal fNIRS hyperscanning study, 29 caregiver-child dyads (children aged 8-9) participated in a novel interactive abstract concept learning task. Preliminary findings suggest that longer durations of mutual gaze and greater brain-to-brain synchronisation over IFG during the caregiver-child interaction significantly predicted children’s abstract concept learning. In our talk, we will present our findings from the ongoing analyses revealing the links between behavioural coordination, brain-to-brain synchronisation, and abstract concept learning.

The meeting link is distributed on our mailing list. If you’re not subscribed to this list, please register here.