UCL Centre for Developmental
Cognitive Neuroscience
Centre for Brain & Cognitive
Development, Birkbeck
AUTUMN WORKSHOP: THE EMERGING SOCIAL BRAIN
Thursday 6th October 2011, 12.15pm – 5pm (buffet lunch@12.15pm, 1pm start)
Kennedy Lecture Theatre, UCL Institute of Child Health, Guilford Street
1.00pm
Welcome: Dr. Michelle de Haan
Reader in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL Institute of Child Health
Chair
Dr. Michelle de Haan
1.10pm
Professor Lynne Murray
Professor in Developmental Psychopathology, University of Reading
‘Mother-infant relationships in the context of postnatal depression: different
kinds of interaction difficulty mediate different outcomes’
1.45pm Professor Pasco Fearon
Director of the Developmental Neuroscience Unit, Anna Freud Centre, London
‘Gene-environment correlation in the first 3 years: mechanisms of risk in the
development of depression’
2.20pm Professor Derek Moore
Director of the Institute for Research on Child Development, U.of East London
‘Assessing the impact of socio-economic status, from infants' brains to social
gains: Initial findings from the ELAS and TALBY studies’
2.55pm Tea/Coffee Break
Chair
Dr. Victoria Southgate
Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development,
Birkbeck, U of London
3.30pm Professor Mark Johnson
Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University
of London
‘The emerging atypical social brain: Studies of infants at-risk for autism’
4:05pm Professor Gergely Csibra
Professor & Head of Department, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Central
European University, Budapest, Hungary and Professor of Psychology, Centre for
Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London.
‘Human infants' expectation for referential communication’
4.40pm
Closing Remarks: Dr. Victoria Southgate
WORKSHOP BACKGROUND For many years researchers have known that the earliest social interactions
have a profound effect on the development of children. More recently, modern neuroscience techniques have allowed
them to directly study how genes and experience shape the way infants’ brains perceive, think about and grow with
the social world around them. This has enabled better understanding of the normal emergence of the social brain
and has opened new approaches for identifying emerging social-emotional problems in infants and toddlers. The UCLCDCN and CBCD at Birkbeck University of London have joined to invite leading researchers to present the latest
developments in the field.
WORKSHOP SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES
Lynne Murray is Research Professor in Developmental Psychopathology at the University of
Reading. Together with her colleagues, she has conducted naturalistic longitudinal,
prospective, studies of clinical populations (maternal depression and anxiety, infant cleft
lip), and intervention studies, to elucidate the role of social relationships in the development
of adverse child psychological outcomes. She also conducts naturalistic and treatment work
with Peter Cooper and their South African colleagues in a peri-urban context in South Africa.
Pasco Fearon is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London, and
Joint-Course Director of UCL's Clinical Psychology Doctoral Training Programme. He trained as a
developmental psychologist at the University of Cambridge (BA) and UCL (PhD) and is also a child
clinical psychologist. He is also an honorary faculty member of the Child Study Center at Yale .
Pasco's work focuses on the interplay between the social environment and biological processes
in child development.
Derek Moore trained at the Institute for Psychiatry and at the DPRU UCL. He is Director of
the Institute for Research in Child Development (IRCD) at the University of East London. He
has published widely in developmental psychology and in the field of intellectual difficulties
and social perception, and is now heading up projects looking at infants-at-risk and at the
impact of SES-related factors on infant and child development. Current
funded projects at IRCD include the Nuffield funded TALBY study; the Wellcome-funded
Well London study and the NIHR funded Olympic Regeneration study
(ORiEL)..
Mark Johnson is a Medical Research Council scientific programme leader and Director of the
Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London. His laboratory
currently focuses on typical and atypical functional brain development in human infants and
toddlers using several different imaging, behavioural and modelling techniques. Along with
his collaborators, he was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in
2006. He received the British Psychological Society President’s Award in 2008, and the
Experimental Psychology Society Mid-Career Award in 2009.
.Gergely Csibra is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Cognitive Science, Central
European University, and, together with György Gergely, leads the Cognitive Development
Center. His research focuses on various aspects of cognitive development in human infants.
Specifically, he studies infants' visual processing from the level of spatial attention and eyemovement control through the intermediate levels of object and face perception to the level
of interpretation of observed actions in terms of goals and understanding of communicative
signals. He is also interested in how cognitive processes are accomplished by the human
brain and how cognitive development can be explained by neural development in infancy.