Associate Professor Dan Hyde and co-investigator Assistant Professor Bo Zhang have received a 5-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the relationship between brain and cognitive development in the context of early numeracy in children from 3 to 6 years of age. We asked Professor Hyde to tell us more about this exciting and ambitious project.

Could you provide some background on the motivation behind this project? What inspired you to take it on?

For years my lab has been studying the neural correlates of numeracy development in young children. Most studies we and others have done involve a single group of children at a single time point. These one-shot studies suggest that there are substantial changes in brain function and organization that happen around the time children begin to learn basic number and math concepts. However, given the difficulty and resource-intense nature of measuring these aspects of brain development in young children, very few have comprehensively tracked these developments in the same group of children over time. Given our experience and success with these methods over the years, we found ourselves in a great position to do exactly the thing that has been lacking: collect longitudinal brain and behavioral data in a large group of children starting before numeracy and following them through the learning process.

What do you consider to be the most significant or impactful aspect of this project for the field of psychology and the university community?

This study is quite large in scope. We will track brain and cognitive development in a large group of over 300 children from the greater Champaign-Urbana area starting around the age of 3 years, seeing them again around age 4, and, finally, after they have started school around the age of 5 1/2 years. For all children, we will attempt to collect multiple measures of functional brain activity. This project promises to result in a longitudinal neuroimaging dataset of unprecedented size, richness, and diversity in the numeracy literature.

Were there any collaborative efforts or partnerships that played a crucial role in the success of this project?

This project is methodologically and analytically complex. I am an expert in methods for assessing cognitive and brain development using behavior, electrophysiology, and optical imaging. Dr. Zhang is an expert in state-of-the-art statistical modeling that will be used to identify developmental predictors and assess directionality in longitudinal brain-behavior relationships. We both bring unique skill sets to produce a project that would not be possible to carry out without collaboration.

Major projects often come with challenges. Could you share a key challenge you faced and how you overcame it?

The project required us to buy quite a bit of new brain imaging equipment. Unfortunately, procurement is known to be very challenging in the State of Illinois, often requiring months of work for more expensive items. Brenda Reinhold in the Psychology Business Office helped us quickly and successfully navigate the complexities of procurement and obtain the equipment we needed to get started. I'm sure there were others at other levels that were integral too. We are just so grateful that they were able to help us buy this equipment without major delays.

On a personal note, what does this achievement mean to you?

This was a great opportunity to bring our respective strengths together to develop a project that would not be possible for either of us to do alone.

Looking ahead, how do you see this project evolving or expanding? What do you hope it will achieve in the long term?

The hope is that our results will help understand whether and to what extent relationships between brain changes and cognitive development in numeracy result from general cognitive development or experience with numbers, identify early predictors of school readiness, and provide novel insights into the cognitive and brain mechanisms that support numeracy learning.

Are there other people you'd like to acknowledge for their contributions to this opportunity's success?

The project would not be possible without the support of the wonderful Psychology Business Office Support Staff, who have helped us with grant development, grant logistics, purchasing, and hiring. They have gone above and beyond to make this project a possibility.