Tag: Development

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‘Which side are you on?’ with Patricia Hoyos

In this episode of The Highlights, we’re joined by Patricia Hoyos, a graduate student in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). We discuss her work on the development of spatial biases in school-aged kids, the challenges and perks of working with children, and her experiences transitioning her work from undergraduate independent work to a graduate project.

This episode of The Highlights was produced under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian in partnership with Princeton Insights. Patricia Hoyos is a graduate student in the Kastner Lab of PNI. She can be reached at phoyos@princeton.edu.

To view the transcript for this episode, click here.

Additional resources:

Princeton Insights coverage: The development of visual-spatial biases in children

Original Paper: Development of spatial biases in school-aged children

Credits:

Written/Hosted by Thiago Tarraf Varella GS and Crystal Lee GS

Produced by Isabel Rodrigues

Original Insights Coverage by Munisa Said GS and Crystal Lee GS

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How the egg drives its own development

Review written by Olivia Duddy (MOL, G4)

How do animals produce a healthy egg cell? To answer this, many developmental biologists investigate the complex choreography of factors required for successful egg cell development, called oogenesis. This process is crucial to the survival and reproduction of many vertebrate and invertebrate species and, remarkably, diverse species often employ a common strategy where the growth of the egg cell is supported by an interconnected network of germline, or reproductive, cells. Like cellular factories, the job of the germline cells is to produce and export nutrients to the egg via connecting cytoplasmic canals. The nutrients these support cells supply to the egg include proteins and the nucleic acids that code for them, called RNA transcripts. 

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The development of visual-spatial biases in children

Written by Munisa Said (PSY, 2022) & Crystal Lee (PSY, GS2)

How good are you at finding Waldo? Whether you’re good or bad at it, finding Waldo is not a trivial task. To do so, you must be able to direct your attention to a specific location in a scene, process a massive amount of noisy input, and, finally, make sense of it. Tasks that you perform in your everyday life like reading, driving, cooking--and yes, finding Waldo--all depend on your ability to direct your visuo-spatial attention, the attentional mechanism that allows you to select information from a specific location in space for processing, as well as filter out irrelevant information from other locations. 

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Parents are encouraged to read to their children when they're young, but is this really so important?

Written by Munisa Said (PSY, 2022) & Crystal Lee (PSY, G2)

Why is it so important for parents to read to their children? Previous research has found that when parents read to their infants (also called “shared reading”), there are significant improvements in early language development (Mol & Bus, 2011). However, not all children broadly benefit from shared reading. The advantages of shared reading vary quite widely among children. A recent paper led by researchers from Princeton and Rutgers Universities endeavored to explain this variability by considering genetic factors that may impact this development of language acquisition. In previous studies, individual differences in dopaminergic and serotonergic systems (the neural pathways that deliver dopamine and serotonin throughout the brain) have been implicated in different outcomes for learning, attention, and behavior.  Thus, Jiminez et al. examined the genetic characteristics of these systems of almost 2,000 children in order to see if this variable also explained the diverse effects of shared reading.

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