Mind Brain and Education

Davidson, Christina; Caes, Line; Shing, Yee Lee; McKay, Courtney; Rafetseder, Eva; Wijeakumar, Sobanawartiny

2023 Mind Brain and Education

doi: 10.1111/mbe.12383

Home enrichment plays an important role in shaping children's development. In the current study, we inquired whether home enrichment was associated with pre‐schoolers' visual working memory (VWM) function, a critical cognitive system necessary for maintaining information for short periods of time. Home enrichment was assessed using an adapted version of the Home Observation Measurement of the Environment Interview. VWM behavior and brain function were collected as children engaged with a color change detection task. Home enrichment was associated with right‐lateralized fronto‐parietal engagement. Specifically, greater home enrichment was linked to increased activation in the right angular gyrus, important for working memory maintenance, and suppression in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), important for re‐orienting attention to distracting events. Critically, home enrichment‐related rIFG suppression was linked to better VWM performance. This work sheds light on potential mechanism(s) through which enrichment in homes might be involved with cognitive function during the preschool years.

Burgess, Andrea N.; Cutting, Laurie E.

2023 Mind Brain and Education

doi: 10.1111/mbe.12378

Despite decades of prior research, the mechanisms of skilled reading development remain elusive. Numerous studies have identified word recognition and oral language ability as key components to explain later reading comprehension performance. However, these components alone do not fully explain differences in reading achievement. There is ongoing work exploring other cognitive processes important for reading, such as the set of skills encompassed in the domain‐general concept of executive function (EF). Here, we summarize our work on the behavioral and neurobiological connections between EF and reading and present preliminary neuroimaging findings from ongoing work. Together, these studies suggest (1) that EF plays a supportive and perhaps indirect role in reading achievement and (2) that EF‐related brain regions interface with the reading and language networks. While further work is needed to dissect the specifics of how EF interacts with reading, these studies begin to reveal the complex role that EF plays in reading development.