Birkbeck academic receives Wolfson Research Merit Award
Professor Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, has been awarded a 2011 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award...
Professor Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, has been awarded a 2011 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
The award is both a recognition of Professor Mareschal’s contribution to research in his field and a five-year grant to fund his new research project into the emergence of basic reasoning skills in young children.
“I was delighted to be given this award,” said Professor Mareschal. “I knew I had been nominated, but it’s a competition across all the sciences, not just psychology, so it is nice to have this acknowledgement of my work, and for the project to have been given such serious consideration.”
The new project will use recent cognitive neuroscientific methods to understand the early development of the skills which underlie scientific reasoning. It will combine computer simulations of learning in the brain, neuroimaging to identify how the relevant functional systems change with age, and behavioural experiments to assess subtle changes in children’s reasoning abilities.
“The senses of time – that events unfold through time – and of causality – that some events are responsible for making other events occur – are fundamental to scientific enquiry,” said Professor Mareschal. “This project will ask how these two fundamental cognitive skills develop in early infancy and childhood, and how they are shaped by the child’s developing brain and motor activity.
“The goal is to understand whether there are neurological bases for the different learning strategies which children might have,” he added. “If so, we can tailor educational programmes to reflect these. While the research will focus on typical development among children from pre-school age through primary school, the findings should be applicable to questions relating to children with learning difficulties.”
Professor Mareschal’s research is part of an educational neuroscience initiative between Birkbeck, the Institute of Education and University College London, bringing the latest findings from cognitive neuroscience to the area of education theory.