Speaker: Victoria Leong, Nanyang Technological University
Title: Understanding early human development through the parent-child interactions
Time: 12.00-13.30
Host: Tristan Bekinschtein
All Zangwill Club talks are held in the Lecture Theatre in the main Psychology building on Downing Site.
Abstract: During early sensitive periods, healthy neurodevelopment depends on warm, contingent communication and social engagement between infants and caregivers. The timing and pattern of these interactions is crucial. Optimally, caregivers provide rich multisensory experiences through responsive and predictable temporal sequences to regulate infant attention and emotion. This creates stable coupled biobehavioural states between parent and child, such as joint attention and emotional synchrony, which potentiate communication and social knowledge transmission between adult and child. This multisensory interface can be described as the parent-child interactome, which provides a systems level description of the parent and child’s joint neurophysiological and sensorimotor state space, created through interaction. In this talk, examples will be provided from both human and animal optogenetic models to illustrate the neural attractor states that arise from dynamics within the parent-offspring interactome. Moving from theory to real-world application, dyadic sociometrics is introduced as a technique for real-time multi-modality AI-based analysis of the parent-child interactome (patent pending). For infants as young as 12 months of age, the parent-child interactome predicts emerging language, socioemotional and cognitive skills with up to 96% accuracy across UK, Singapore and Brazil cohorts. This scalable technology is now being trialled by early intervention service providers in Singapore as a culture-fair deep phenotyping tool for early developmental profiling. The future potential for interactome-based techniques to advance current understanding of neurodevelopment and sensitive periods, and to be used in early risk identification and personalised therapeutics is discussed.
If you would like to join the post-lecture meal with the speaker, please contact Reception in advance. NB. Postgraduate students in the Department of Psychology are subsidised by the department and only pay £10 towards the cost of their meal.
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For more information on this talk and others in the series, please see: https://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/6342
Posted on 26/05/2026
