CF September 2010

September 24, 2010

Welcome to the new members!

Send Ruth email if you (or any new collaborators, post-docs, grad students) need to be added to the cognitive factors d-list

Send Jo email if you need to be added to the general PSLC d-list

Advisory board dates - January 20 & 21, 2011 (Thur and Fri)

Speaker Series - Rob Goldstone has agreed to come (probably before the AB)

Handout: Cognitive Factors Thrust Plan, if see you see errors send them to Chuck (link to document coming soon)

In general for Annual Report and Strategic Plan it is important to have non-text contributions; send screenshots/pictures of interventions and/or graphs of results as they come up

Also as a general reminder, it is never too early to send bullets of exciting findings, usually collected at least once a year

Talk: How does learning to write help learning to read Chinese (fMRI study) - Fan Cao Abstract Two types of instructions were given to a group of English speakers who learn Chinese as a L2. One is character writing and the other is pinyin writing. The hypothesis is that writing will facilitate the integration of orthographic, phonological and semantic representations by involving both perception and production and by emphasizing the special features of Chinese characters. fMRI scans found that sensory-motor cortex and visual-spatial representation cortex are more involved if the subject had writing experience. We also found that writing training produced more elaborated representations of orthography, phonology and semantics in the brain as compared to pinyin training.

Slides to be uploaded soon

Next up: Colleen Davy will speak at the October meeting, likely the last week of Oct at CMU