Paige Harden - University of Texas
Childhood Executive Functions: Heritability, Neurobiology, and Philosophical Luckiness
Date: 01/11/2018 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall 270
Organizer: Dan Belsky
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
8:30am - Breakfast- J Wertz
9:00am - Breakfast- J Wertz
9:30am - Breakfast- J Wertz
10:00am - OPEN
10:30am - OPEN
11:00am - OPEN
11:30am - Lunch- Angie O'Rand
12:00pm - Lunch- Angie O'Rand
12:30pm - Lunch- Angie O'Rand
1:00pm - Belsky et al.
1:30pm - Belsky et al.
2:00pm - Belsky et al.
2:30pm - Giovanna Merli
3:00pm - Seminar Prep
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: In the first half of this talk, I describe our empirical research on childhood executive functions (EFs) in the Texas Twin Project, an ongoing study of a child and adolescent twins and multiples in central Texas. EFs are supervisory cognitive processes that modulate goal-directed cognitive operations and include inhibition, switching, updating, and working memory abilities. In a series of studies of n > 800 twin children ages 8-13, we found that childhood EFs (1) are already nearly perfectly heritable by middle childhood, (2) engage the same fronto-parietal and cingulo-opercular brain networks as adults, (3) are associated with individual differences in school achievement, psychopathology, and BMI. In the second half of this talk, I describe new philosophical work on the ethical and political implications of sociogenomic research linking genetic differences between people to phenotypes, such as EFs, that are relevant for social inequality. In particular, I consider how genotypes and, more problematically, genetically-influenced phenotypes can be understood within the framework of the philosophy of luck, and sketch how the concept of “genetic luck” can be useful for understanding the compatibility of sociogenomic research with a broad spectrum of political values and ideologies.