Summary: | "This book, the product of a quarter century of research, provides an empirical account of the early development of attention and self-regulation in infants and young children. It examines the brain areas involved in regulatory networks, their connectivity, and how their development is influenced by genes and experience. Relying on the latest techniques in cognition and temperament measurement, neuroimaging, and molecular genetics, the book integrates research on neural networks common to all humans with studies of individual differences. The authors explain where, when, and how the brain performs functions that are necessary for learning. Such functions include attending to information; controlling attention through effort; regulating the interplay of emotion with cognition; and coding, organizing, and retrieving information. The authors suggest how these aspects of brain development can support school readiness, literacy, numeracy, and expertise. The audience for this book includes neuroscientists as well as developmental and educational psychologists who have interest in the latest brain research. The many helpful visuals--including brain diagrams, pictures and photographs of experimental setups, and graphs and tables displaying key data--also give this book appeal for graduate students." "This volume traces development of the human brain from infancy through middle childhood from the perspective of cognitive and affective neuroscience. We view the brain in terms of networks of neural areas that can be shown to be active when adults orient their attention or resolve conflict between competing thoughts or emotions. We ask how these networks develop and what their consequences are for the developing child and the adults with whom they interact. Because formal schooling plays such an important role in this development, we are particularly concerned with networks involved in processing the written word and in carrying out numerical computations. The first part of this volume provides a background for relating new developments to past ideas about the brain and education. The second part of this volume deals with the development of attention networks in infants and young children. The third part of the volume deals with what is known about brain changes during the learning of individual school subjects"--Book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).
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