Project Abstract/Summary
Humans rely heavily on vision to navigate and interact with our environment. An important visual skill learned during childhood is how to efficiently plan where and what we will visually attend. Reading this very text, for example, involved learning how to make and plan eye movements horizontally across a page. The ability to plan and control where in space we attend is called visuospatial attention. While it underlies several critical childhood skills, how brain development supports visuospatial attention is not well understood. From studies in adults, we know that the parietal lobe is a region of the brain that has been implicated in visuospatial attention and reading, along with another brain structure called the cerebellum. However, the cerebellum has largely been ignored in the study of human brain development. The research goals of this project involve measuring how the function of the parietal lobe and cerebellum mature during typical development by comparing children and adults. This project aims to understanding how these two brain structures coordinate their development to support a child’s ability to attend to their visual world. Given that visuospatial attention is thought to be atypical in children diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorders, mapping how the parietal and cerebellar regions of the typical brain mature into adulthood is paramount to better understanding these learning disorders. Through educational field trips to elementary school classrooms and game-based experiments designed to better engage young minds, the project is designed to not only benefit children’s education but improve our understanding of childhood brain development.
The primary goal of this project is to measure how visual space is represented in parietal and cerebellar cortex and how this representation matures from childhood to adulthood. Through these measurements, we aim to understand how these developing brain structures support a child’s improving ability to control attention across visual space during tasks like reading. To accomplish this, the work uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to non-invasively measure how parietal and cerebellar cortex respond to visual stimuli, how this response changes when attention is directed towards or away from the stimulus, and how the parietal lobe and the cerebellum coordinate their activity during tasks which require visuospatial attention. More specifically, receptive fields in parietal and cerebellar cortex are measured, which is the area of visual space over which a brain region pools information. The receptive field, like a spotlight, informs us about where in visual space a brain region is processing information. The experiments explore how this visual spotlight might change in size and become more mobile across development to support skilled visuospatial attention and reading. By including the cerebellum in the MRI measurements, better understanding about how the cerebellum might play an important role in overall brain maturation is achieved. While studying attention in children is inherently difficult, the project centers novel experiments designed to resemble video games to better engage children and map brain structures which have otherwise been too difficult to chart across development. The game-based experiments represent freely available resources for clinicians and educators to more easily study childhood visuospatial attention and reading. Data collected from these experiments go towards planned STEM education exercises designed to strengthen computer programming skills in introductory classrooms.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Principal Investigator
Jesse Gomez – Princeton University located in PRINCETON, NJ
Co-Principal Investigators
Funders
Funding Amount
$466,640.00
Project Start Date
08/15/2024
Project End Date
07/31/2029
Will the project remain active for the next two years?
The project has more than two years remaining
Source: National Science Foundation
Please be advised that recent changes in federal funding schemes may have impacted the project’s scope and status.
Updated: April, 2025