Growing up amid a swirl of Russian, Hebrew, and English fed Elika Bergelson’s passion for language development.
Her parents had emigrated in the 1970s from the Soviet Union to Israel, where they began their family. Bergelson and her youngest sibling were born in the 1980s after the family settled in Columbus, Ohio. Even back then, she noticed generational differences around grammar, accents, and vocabularies that left her asking how the kids had outpaced the adults.
“What is it about language acquisition that makes younger minds — which are usually less good at...
"Sun and her colleagues leverage a method developed at the lab of Harvard Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Randy Buckner to identify and target these networks in individual subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood oxygen levels. 'At Buckner lab, we recruit human subjects and put them in an MRI scanner,” Sun explains. “We ask them to do various tasks like remembering the past or imagining the future, and we scan the subjects very intensively over a course of several months using fMRI imaging to get a...
Time and again, science finds that poverty is hard on developing brains.
“Higher levels of anxiety and depression are well-established among kids growing up in families with lower income,” said Harvard psychology Professor Katie A. McLaughlin. “Over the past decade or so, we’ve learned there are also well-replicated differences in brain development as a function of a family’s socioeconomic status.”
Herbert C. Kelman, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics emeritus at Harvard and the director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (1993-2003), died March 1 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. He was 94.
Psychologists Named to NIMH Advisory Council NIMH has appointed three new psychologists to the National Advisory Mental Health Council. Congratulations to Marguerita Lightfoot, PhD, Oregon Health & Science University – Portland State University School of Public Health; Joel T. Nigg, PhD,Oregon Health &P Science...
It’s simple, it’s free, it’s addictive, it’s Wordle. But what makes the online daily puzzle so appealing? And what parts of the brain are being activated when players try to guess a five-letter word in six tries? The Gazette turned to Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist and Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, for answers.
