Science must question itself to define its place in the cultural and moral transformations that today requires our Civilization, and consequently must also constructively challenge those who design public policies: any scientific agenda that points to these efforts will contribute to building a more equal and fair society.

The work we do in our research team has three main goals.

• • Learning about Poverty and Emotional and Cognitive Development:

First, we want to better understand the impact of living in poverty on children’s emotional and cognitive development during their first 20 years of life. Here, we consider how different social and cultural factors influence their brain development. We work collaboratively with our regional and international partners.

• • Interventions to help kids:

We also create, run, and test experimental interventions that explore how the brain’s neural pathways (neuronal plasticity) and an individual’s ability to learn new skills (cognitive plasticity) can change during emotional and cognitive development. We study this topic in infants, children, and teens from low-income and wealthier backgrounds.  Over the past 25 years, we have implemented different experiments, including cognitive training through manual and computerized activities, mother-child play sessions, and adaptation of school curricula.

• • Policies for Child Development:

Our final goal is to apply this knowledge to design, implement, and evaluate policies promoting human development. We do this by understanding the views that caregivers and others involved in childcare have regarding self-regulatory development, which is how kids learn to understand and manage their own thoughts and feelings. We also work on creating decision-making tools, like algorithms, to help design and track policies focused on early childhood.

Key Findings

Growing up in poverty during childhood can impact how children manage their emotions and how they learn. However, these effects are not the same for every child.  A broad range of factors can lead to different outcomes for children coming from homes living with and without socioeconomic deprivations.  These factors can be, for example, the child’s health, the quality of relationships with their caretakers, environmental stressors, learning opportunities, parenting styles, the caregivers’ mental health, educational quality, and community resources. After implementing our experimental interventions, such as training and curriculum adaptation, we observed a positive influence on the children’s emotional development and learning capacities.

Further Readings

Migeot, J., Panesso, C., Duran-Aniotz, C., Ochoa, C., Huepe, D., Santamaría-García, H., . . & Lipina, S.J. (in press). Allostasis, health, and development in Latin America. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.

Delgado, H., Lipina, S.J., Mamen Pastor, V., Muniz Terrera, G., Rodríguez, R., . . . & Carboni, A. (2024). Differential psychophysiological responses associated with decision-making in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14082.

Pietto, M., Giovannetti, F., Segretin, M.S., Kamienkowski, J.E., & Lipina, S.J. (2023). Increased integration of functional connectivity after cognitive intervention in preschoolers from low socioeconomic status. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/dev0001541.

Lipina, S.J. (2023). The importance of conceiving human development as a complex system. The Lancet Global Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00502-2.

Stevens, C., Pakulak, E., Segretin, M.S., Lipina, S.J. (Eds.) (2020). Neuroscientific explorations of poverty. Erice, Italy: International School of Mind, Brain and Education – Ettore Majorana Foundation for Scientific Culture. ISBN 978-987-86-6736-2.

Providing opportunities for every child and family to thrive can be accelerated by globally sharing science and cultural knowledge surrounding learning and wellbeing.

The work of my laboratory team examines the neural basis of affect, learning, and attention.
We try to understand the dynamics of the brain and body and how they align with environmental demands to engage in learning. We use convergent techniques ranging from neurophysiological recording in rodents, computational and robotic models, and work that translates our basic science for the purpose of studying learning in natural settings such as classrooms. We examine experiential history as a means to understand individual differences in physiology, brains, and their manifestation in classroom learning. We believe that gaining a deep understanding of what makes the brain change states, and how those states impact learning and socialization can be fundamental in imagining how societies can be aligned with the learning needs of children and families for the purpose of thriving and wellbeing. I also engage in work directly with schools, educators, non-profits, and in global science of learning advocacy towards grass roots efforts to support education and society. In my first career, I was a high school mathematics teacher.

Key Findings

Time and timing matter for learning. The way in which students are able to synchronize or time their attention and action with their teachers and other students may relate to how well they are able to quickly pay attention to things in the world, like speech streams and video streams. We did a series of studies and discovered that an individual’s ability to musically synchronize with another person is related to their ability to rapidly attend to information, both auditory and visual. Group musical activities may be particularly relevant to building the ability to synchronize with others.

Further Reading

Khalil, AC, Minces, VH, Iversen, J, Musacchia, G, Zhao, C, Chiba, AA (2019) Music, Cognition, and Education. 21st CENTURY EDUCATION: THE LEARNER, THE ENVIRONMENT OECD Publications.

Khalil AK, Minces VH, McLoughlin, G. & Chiba A (2013). Musical synchrony predicts attention in school children. Frontiers in Educational Psychology, Special Issue: Educational Neuroscience, Constructivist Learning, and the Mediation of Learning and Creativity in the 21st Century. Front. Psychol, 02 September.

D’Andrea-Penna, G.M., Iversen, J.R., Chiba, A.A., Khalil, A.K., Minces, V.H. (2020) One Tap at a Time: Correlating Sensorimotor Synchronization with Brain Signatures of Temporal Processing, Cerebral Cortex Communications, Volume 1, Issue 1.