Novel approaches to study neurobiological underpinnings of individual differences in development

This event is part of a series of Psychology seminars that regularly occurs during the Autumn and Spring terms.

This talk will introduce two experimental approaches leveraging advanced methodologies to investigate individual differences in early development.

In the first part of this talk, Anna Gui will present findings from the first gene discovery study focusing on infancy, where researchers applied a range of biostatistical methods on a sample of over 70K children to determine how common genetic variation influences individual differences in the age at onset of walking.

In the second part of her talk, Anna will present a series of studies where they applied an artificial intelligence-enriched neuroimaging approach, Neuroadaptive Bayesian Optimisation, to capture individual infants’ preferential attention to social cues. Anna will discuss the potential of these two complementary approaches as evidence-based tools for the identification of early individual differences in developmental trajectories.