Kia Tīmata Pai - The Best Start EEG substudy
Subject(s)Psychology, Social Sciences.
DegreeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
SupervisorProfessor Vincent Reid
About this opportunity
Development of communication and self-regulation skills is fundamental to psychosocial maturation in childhood. The Kia Tīmata Pai Best Start (KTP) longitudinal study aims to promote these skills through interventions delivered at hundreds of early childcare centres across New Zealand. In addition to evaluating effects of the interventions on behavioural and cognitive outcomes, the study utilises electroencephalography (EEG) to characterise cortical development in a subsample of participating children. These children have been tracked since todderhood and have participated in multiple lab visits over that time to help us understand the development of an array of cognitive capacities. These children are now around age six. This large research programme is the result of a successful Marsden Council Award to Professor Elaine Reese (Otago), Professor Vincent Reid (Waikato) and Professor Justin O'Sullivan (Auckland).
This Ph.D. project seeks to evaluate new measures related to how children understand semantic expectations - a form of complex processing. The N400 component of the Event-Related Potential will be induced in a semantic mismatch paradigm. This information will be examined with other measures indexing perceptual, social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development. We will also compare these factors for children who have not taken part in the KTP intervention. Through so doing, we will understand how these factors related to each other in the context of complex information processing during the early school years. This has a range of implications for childhood education with this project firmly in the field of developmental educational neuroscience. For background on see Celebrating Marsden research Impact Story: Helping Children self-regulate
This project is funded by a Study Award via Research and Enterprise.
Location
Hamilton Campus, University of Waikato.
Scholarship Value
Up to $30,000 per year for up to 36 months + domestic tuition fees and Student Services Fee
Eligibility
Prior experience of handling raw EEG data
Prior experience of developmental EEG data editing and analysis
Essential: skills in R for statistical analysis and data display
Essential: Evidence of high quality written research skills
Essential: Evidence of synthesising literature on toddler EEG, together with an understanding of the development of ERP morphologies.