Congratulations to our undergraduate Becky Liu, who has been awarded a Hilldale Fellowship for her project “Cross Cultural Investigation of Foundational Fractions Concepts”. This Hilldale award builds on Becky’s successful Welton application last year, and will support Becky’s project in which she compares fractions understanding between groups of Native English speakers and Native Chinese speakers.
Come See Our Undergrads Present at the Undergrad Symposium
The Ed Neuro Lab will have five presentations at the Undergraduate Symposium this Thursday, April 14.
URS student Maiyer Vang will be presenting a poster (Session 1 12:30 – 1:45) Investigating the Neural Basis of Developmental Gerstmann’s Syndrome
Hilldale Award Winner Grace George will be presenting a poster (Session 2: 2:00 – 3:15 p.m) Investigations Into the Neural Basis of Effective Math Teaching
URS student Kim Crow will be presenting a poster (Session 3 3:30 – 4:45) FMRI Investigations of Multisensory Integration of Number
Hilldale Award Winner Jennifer Hathaway will be presenting a poster (Session 3 3:30 – 4:45) Neural Mechanisms Supporting Multisensory Integration of Number
URS student Nina Vakil will be speaking on The Link Between Fraction Magnitude Representations and Math Skills
For all the details, and information about all the other wonderful presentations, see the full program.
Ed to Speak at Temple University
Ed will be heading to Philadelphia to speak at Temple University in their Temple Institute for Learning & Education Sciences series next Wednesday, April 13. He will be speaking about Understanding Fractions: A Case Study in Educational Neuroscience.
The Ed Neuro Lab is at CNS
The Educational Neuroscience Lab is sending a party of three (Liz, Radhika and Zac) to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in the Big Apple!
We will be presenting three posters on our work, and Radhika will also present as a data blitz talk:
Data Blitz Session 1 (Saturday 2:54 – 3:00 pm) Talk 5: Decoding Grapheme-Color Synesthesia Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis*
Radhika Gosavi, Emma Meyering, Nathan Rose, Bradley Postle & Edward Hubbard
* The Data Blitz talk is also part of the Graduate Student Award (GSA) Radhika received from CNS
B32 (Sunday 8:00-10:00 am) An ALE Meta-analysis of Facial Processing in Autism
Zachary Grulke & Edward Hubbard
D173 (Monday 8:00-10:00 am) Individual Differences in Spatial Representations of Fractions Relate to Formal Math Achievement
Elizabeth Y. Toomarian & Edward M. Hubbard
F151 (Tuesday 8:00-10:00 am) Decoding Grapheme-Color Synesthesia Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis
Radhika Gosavi, Emma Meyering, Nathan Rose, Bradley Postle & Edward Hubbard
Please stop by and check out the latest work from the lab!
Radhika Awarded NSF Honorable Mention
Congratulations to our second year PhD student, Radhika Gosavi, for her Honorable Mention in the 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program for her application to study the neural correlates of synesthesia! Radhika’s Honorable Mention was one of only 38 nationwide in the Cognitive Neuroscience area.
Liz Defends Master’s Thesis
Congratulations to our third year PhD student, Liz Toomarian, who successfully defended her Master’s Thesis, The Spatial Representations of Fractions on the Mental Number Line. Liz’s work includes a series of behavioral studies examining the mental representation of fractions on the mental number line, and a large study of individual differences in fraction processing. Parts of this work have been presented at conferences including CNS and AERA, and submitted for publication.
New Media Coverage of Our Psych. Science article
Our new Psychological Science article, Individual Differences in Nonsymbolic Ratio Processing Predict Symbolic Math Performance, has been getting a fair bit of media coverage, including press releases from the American Psychological Society (APS) which publishes Psych. Science, our own School of Education, and even Jonathan Wai’s excellent blog over at Psychology Today.
APS: Basic Ratio Capacity May Serve as Building Block for Math Knowledge
UW-Madison SOE: Abstract math concepts may be grounded in basic non-symbolic processing abilities
Psychology Today: Do Humans Have A Basic Capacity To Understand Fractions?
New Article Out in Psych. Science
Our new article describing how individual differences in perceptual ratio processing relate to college student’s math abilities (especially fractions) is now out in Psychological Science.
Matthews, P.G. Lewis, M.R. and Hubbard, E.M. (2015). Individual Differences in Nonsymbolic Ratio Processing Predict Symbolic Math Performance, Psychological Science, first published on December 28, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0956797615617799
In this article, we lay out a theory for the perceptual foundations of fraction processing, based on a basic system for non-symbolic ratio processing, which we dub the “ratio processing system” (RPS), by analogy with the approximate number system (ANS). We test a key prediction of this account by showing that individual differences in RPS precision relate to higher-order math skills, including fractions processing, and strikingly, even algebra skills!
Ed Interviewed for a Story About Synesthesia
Ed was interviewed for a story about synesthesia, The Science Behind Why Some People Can Taste Words, by Laura Donovan for ATTN magazine. The story focuses on lexical-gustatory synesthesia, and how synesthetes might use their experiences in learning and memory.
Ed to Speak at Harvard
Ed will be at Harvard Friday, October 23 as part of a one-day workshop titled “Synesthesia – A Window into Brain Development” hosted by Takao Hensch and Daphne Maurer. He will be speaking about “Developing & Decoding Synesthesia” including our recent work using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to decode the neural mechanisms of synesthesia (see also our SFN presentation that Radhika will be giving this week).