Genes, brain, and behaviour in the cot: A twin study of infant development employing state of the art neuropsychological assessment

Angelica Roland (primary)
Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck
Pasco Fearon (secondary)
Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology
University College London

Abstract

The first two years of life are foundational for lifelong physical and psychological health.  This project will combine the behavioural genetic twin design, a powerful tool for estimating heritability and environmental influence, with state of the art neuropsychological and biopsychosocial assessments. It will investigate the links between genes, brain, and behaviour during the infant years. Only recently are the challenges of recruiting and assessing infant samples being overcome in order to obtain advanced neuropsychological and behavioural assessments. This study will involve sophisticated computational modelling to address fundamental questions about the causes of infant development.

 


References

1 Papageorgiou, K. A. & Ronald, A. (2013). He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the finest view of them” A Systematic Review of Genetic Studies On Psychological Traits In Infancy. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 37, 1500-1517.

2. Taylor-Colls, S., & Fearon, R. M. P. (2015). The Effects of Parental Behavior on Infants’ Neural Processing of Emotion Expressions. Child Development, 86, 877-888.

3. Ronald, A. (2011). Is the Child ‘father of the man’? Evaluating the stability of genetic influences across development (Invited annual review). Developmental Science, 14, 1471-8.

4. Thomas, M. S. C., Forrester, N. A. & Ronald, A. (2016). Multi-scale modeling of gene-behavior associations in an artificial neural network model of cognitive development. Cognitive Science, 40, 51-99.

5. Ronald, A., Larsson, H., Anckarsäter, H. & Lichtenstein, P. (2011). A twin study of autism symptoms in Sweden. Molecular Psychiatry.


BBSRC Area
Genes, development and STEM* approaches to biology
Area of Biology
DevelopmentGenetics
Techniques & Approaches
GeneticsSimulation / Modelling