Introducing Professor Iroise Dumontheil: Our CNH September Feature Story
Can you describe your research interests?
"My research focuses on the development of cognitive control, or executive functions, during childhood and adolescence, and their functioning in adulthood, as well as the inter-relationship between cognitive control and social cognition and emotional regulation. I have used a range of methods to study both typical development and individual differences, including genetics, neuroimaging, computerised tasks and questionnaires, and longitudinal data. I am also interested in how what we learn from this basic developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience research may inform the development of cognitive training interventions and educational practice.
My current research focuses particularly on the development of metacognition during childhood and adolescence, and the role of metacognition in mathematics. I will study this using behavioural measures, as well as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a neuroimaging method that provides lower spatial resolution than fMRI but is portable and less sensitive to participants’ movement – which can be a challenge when testing primary school children!"
What inspired you to pursue this research topic?
"While individual differences in executive functions associate with academic outcome, in particular in maths, cognitive training interventions focusing on improving executive function skills like working memory have unfortunately not shown transfer of improvements to academic outcomes. Interventions with a metacognitive element have tended to be more successful. This has inspired me to investigate the development of metacognition and how this may inform how teachers may scaffold children’s use of metacognitive skills in the classroom. I am grateful that the ARC agreed to fund this research project."
What do you like most about your work?
"My lab in MSPS is still very new, as I joined less than 2 years ago, and it took me a while to recruit PhD students. My students have complementary training in developmental and educational psychology, maths education and IT, and developmental cognitive neuroscience, and I hope this will allow them to learn from each other and help each other to accomplish the multi-disciplinary research involved in this project.
We are in the early days of our research but we have been enjoying thinking about task design and learning PsychoPy to implement these tasks. However, it is also a challenging aspect of this research as we need to design tasks that have the right level of difficulty across a broad age range (7-13 year-olds + young adults).
Another challenge is recruitment – I have discovered that the Department of Education in Victoria does not allow this type of research to be carried in schools, which considerably impacts our ability to recruit and test large samples. Inspired by colleagues at UQ we will be trialling collecting data at ScienceWorks, which I hope is successful, but it has limited how many tasks we can collect within the same children."
Do you have any exciting projects or news upcoming?
"If you know any children aged 7-13 years old in Melbourne, please encourage them to take part in the research in my lab! They will get some stickers and a brain stress ball as goodies and will get to experience STEM research first-hand."