VT College of Science Magazine Annual 2014 | Page 7

(above) Infant research participant and mother pose for former graduate student Christy Wolfe and Martha
Ann Bell. Wolfe is now an associate professor of psychology at Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky.

“As undergraduates, most students aren’t to the point yet of thinking of work-life balance, they’re focused on getting into grad school
and starting a career. After a couple years of grad school, when they
start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, they start thinking
more of family and balance.
“Students today are very focused on having a career – but equally
focused on family so somewhere along the way they want conversations about work/life balance. Those are the big issues with both the
women and the men I mentor.”
Some of those students end up working with Bell as she continues
research through a grant she received in 2013 from the National
Institutes of Health worth $2.8 million over five years. The longitudinal study looks at individual differences in frontal lobe development and cognitive behavior with 200 children locally and 200 more
who were recruited for the partner lab at the University of North
Carolina, Greensboro.
“We’re watching these children grow up from infancy to school age
right now,” she explained. “We saw them twice in infancy and once
in toddlerhood and twice in early childhood and now with the grant
extension, we’ll see them again at 6 and 10 years of age. What we’re
looking at is complex cognitive behaviors. By the time children are
9 to 10 years old, they are very close to operating at an adult level;
not speed-wise, but to a point where the cognitive processing is
very similar to what an adult would do.”
The behaviors being studied go back to childhood and the researchers; because of the extent of the study, can look at the roots of those
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behaviors. By looking at what they observed when the children
were infants or preschoolers, they can predict how the children will
do at ages 9 to 10 with tasks directly linked to school performance.
“At age 3 and 4 we have a hypothesis on how the children will perform in reading and math,” she explained. The intriguing point is
that children who are all similar in that they have good opportunities, health care, and relatively similar kinds of lives, perform very
differently on cognitive performance measures. “We know they
have different levels of math and reading and we’re trying to figure
out where those differences come from.”
To do that, Bell and her team measure cognitive as well as emotionrelated behaviors; how the children learn to control emotions and
attention; how mothers interact with the children at each age; and
a variety of other indicators, like biological measures associated
with cognition and emotion, such as resting and task-related EEG
and ECG.
The study will add to the knowledge base of why some children do
well in school while others do not. “If we can determine where children start to diverge, at what age, what skills start to look different
at various age points, then there are all sorts of early intervention
programs that might help,” Bell said. “Our research is basic, foundational research; we add to the knowledge base about typical development, and researchers with an applied focus will be able to take
that information and solve the problem of why some children have
difficulties in learning and in school.”

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