This study may be the first to examine the effects of institutional care on brain-behavior relations and the efficacy of intervention on such relations, Nelson said. He will discuss the progress of three groups of children in Bucharest, Romania. The first live in orphanages, the second entered the orphanage after birth but were randomly assigned to foster care shortly after entering the orphanage, and the third were never institutionalized and live with their biological families. Nelson and colleagues Charles Zeanah, M.D., a child psychiatrist at Tulane University, and Nathan Fox, Ph.D, a child psychologist at the University of Maryland, found that institutionalized children lagged behind both children living with their families and previously institutionalized children in foster care on several measures of development: cognition, language abilities, behavioral adjustment and neurophysiological indicators. Nelson will discuss the implications of his findings, including issues of timing and duration of institutional vs. foster care. The work is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Johnson and Johnson Pediatric Institute.
Preceding Nelson will be three presenters who will discuss the brain's immense, multipronged capacity to respond to experience (plasticity), especially early in life, as well as implications of their research in such areas as learning, psychopathology and the effects of early intervention. A list of speakers and their topics, in order of presentation, follows.
Embargoed until 2 p.m. MST (4 p.m. EST) Friday, Feb. 14, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A related AAAS news briefing, "Does Infant Stress Spell Trouble Later?," will be held at that time.
Contacts:
Charles Nelson, University of Minnesota, 612-624-3878
Deane Morrison, University News Service, 612-624-2346