Postdoc at NDU-ICH

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF POTENTIAL CANDIDATES


A position of POSTDOC is to become available on 1/11/99 until 30/9/2001 at
the recently created Neurocognitive Development Unit (NDU), Institute of
Child Health, London, funded by Programme and Project Grants from the
Medical Research Council, U.K., and studentships from the MRC, the Down's
Syndrome Association, and the Williams Syndrome Foundation.  We are a
small, dynamic unit, focused on understanding atypical cognitive
development in genetic disorders from infancy through adulthood. Our aims
and interests are set out at the bottom of this ad.  We are looking for a
postdoc, with special interest and experience in infancy research and
atypical development. The Institute of Child Health has excellent research
facilities and is situated in the Bloomsbury area of central London, very
close to a large community of researchers focused on cognitive
neuroscience.  Salary between 18,420 and 20,319 pounds sterling (including
London weighting), depending on experience, qualifications, and age.
Application closing date: 22nd July 1999.  Please send your full CV, the
names of two academic referees, and a description of your research
experience and current research interests (no more than 1000 words please)
to:

Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit
Institute of Child Health
30 Guilford Street
London WC1N 1EH,  U.K.
tel:     +44 171 905 2754
          secretary: 242 9789 ext.0735
fax:     +44 171 242 7717

The NDU has the following aims:
- to map in detail the cognitive end state of a variety of developmental
disorders
- to trace these cognitive profiles to their origins in infancy
- to explore the mechanisms underlying the developmental trajectories which
connect the start state to the end state;
- ultimately to devise remediation techniques useable in early infancy when
the brain displays its maximum neocortical plasticity.

Our current research focuses on infants, children and adults with Williams
syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). We plan subsequently to add a
number of other syndromes, as a function of their different start and/or
end states.  In particular, we aim to explore the **cognitive** processes
underlying **behavioural** outcomes, and we therefore focus on areas in
which abnormal phenotypes show relative proficiency rather than solely on
their areas of impairment.  Indeed, even in areas where the output of the
cognitive system looks normal (e.g., in the rather good language and face
processing skills of people with WS), the processes underlying the
behavioural output may be different.  We are also particularly concerned
with demonstrating that the initial state in infancy cannot be simply
assumed from the end state in middle childhood and adulthood. This has an
important theoretical bearing on the current use of atypical outcomes to
make claims about innately specified, independently functioning modules in
the starting state.  Indeed, there has been a tendency to use the adult
neuropsychological model of intact and impaired modules as an approach to
the study of developmental disorders. When neuropsychologists find
cognitive deficits in normal adults who have suffered brain damage, they
try to isolate the 'components' of the cognitive system. The same approach
is often   taken with developmental disorders, particularly when these
disorders are genetically based. So if a syndrome displays an uneven
cognitive profile in the end state, it is frequently argued that this must
be due to the child having started life with a pattern of preserved and
impaired modules. We believe this assumption to be erroneous, in that it
tends to neglect the role of development itself in ontogenetic outcomes
(Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a). The relationship between genes and outcome is a
very indirect one, with the environment playing an essential role in
driving different developmental trajectories. A very subtle difference in
the start state can gives rise to huge differences in the developmental
outcome (Elman et al., 1996;Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a; Oliver, et al., in
press; Thomas, in press; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, in press). This is why
we are focusing a substantial part of our current research effort on
infancy and why we are seeking a new Postdoc to join the team. We are also
exploring via computational models a number of different hypotheses about
the subtle impairment in the WS start state that may result in the pattern
of deficits and behavioural proficiences seen in the WS end state. In
general, we have found that the use of connectionist models helps clarify
theoretical concepts and provides new empirical predictions for future
research (Elman et al., 1996; Mareschal & Thomas, submitted). In general,
we bring to bare a variety of different approaches, theoretical and
empircal, on the questions we are addressing.

Selected  recent publications of the NDU team
Brown, J., Paterson, S.J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith,
A. (1999) The development of bodyt-centered representations: Spatial frames
of reference in infants with Williams and Down syndromes. Poster
Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child
Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico.

Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and
Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on
development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Berthoud, I., & Christophe, A. (1996) Is
the language of people with Williams syndrome mere mimicry? Verbal
short-term memory in a foreign language. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive,
15, 615-628.

Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Gathercole, S.,  Howlin, P., Davies, M.,  &
Udwin, O.  (1997) Verbal Short-term Memory and its relation to Language
Acquisition in Williams Syndrome.  Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 2, 81-99.


Karmiloff-Smith, A.  (1997)  Crucial differences between developmental
cognitive neuroscience and adult neuropsychology.  Developmental
Neuropsychology, 13, 4, 513-524.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998) Development itself is the key to
understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive  Sciences, 2,
10, 389-398.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P. &
Udwin, O. (1997) Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact is "Intact"?
Child Development, 68, 2, 246-262.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., Tyler, L.K., Voice, K., Sims, K., Udwin, O., Davies,
M., and Howlin, P.  (1998)  Linguistic Dissociations in Williams Syndrome:
Evaluating Receptive Syntax in on-line and off-line tasks.
Neuropsychologia, 36, 4, 342-351.

Laing, E., Hulme, C. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A preliminary study of
reading abilities in people with Williams syndrome. York Conference on
Reading.


Mareschal, D. & Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Self-organization in normal and
abnormal cognitive development.  To appear The Handbook of Brain and
Behaviour in Human Development.

Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A. & Pennington, B. (in press)
Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist
framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science.

Paterson, S.J., Brown, J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith,
A. (1999) A comparison of cognitive and language performance in 24, 30 and
36 month old infants with Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome. Poster
Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child
Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico.

Paterson, S., Brown, J., Gsodl, MK., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A.
Brain modularity in genetic disorders: Infant profiles cannot be derived
from phenotypic outcomes. (submitted).

Rae. C., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Lee, M.A., Dixon, R.M., Blamire, A.M.,
Thompson, C.H., Grant, J., Styles, P. & Radda, G.K.. (1998)  Brain
Biochemistry in Williams Syndrome. Evidence for a role of the cerebellum in
cognition? Neurology, 51, 33-40.

Stevens, T. & Karmiloff-Smith, A.  (1997) Word Learning in a Special
Population:  Do Individuals with Williams syndrome Obey Lexical
Constraints?  Journal of Child Language, 24, 737-765.

Tassabehji, M., Metcalfe, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Carette, M.J., Grant,
J., Dennis, N., Reardon, W., Splitt, M., Read, A.P., and Donnai, D. (1999)
Williams Syndrome:  Use of Chromosomal Microdeletions as a Tool to Dissect
Cognitive and Physical Phenotypes.  American Journal of Human Genetics,
64(1), 118-125.


Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Constructivism's promise: Commentary on O)liver,
Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, and Pennington. Developmental Science.

T h o m a s ,   M .   S .   C .   a n d   K a r m i l o f f - S m i t h ,
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a l   i s s u e   o f   L e a r n i n g   a n d   I n d i v i d u a l   D i
f f e r e n c e s .

 Thomas, M.S.C., & Mareschal, D. (1999) Metaphor as categorisation: A
connectionist implementation. Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on
Metaphor, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive, pp: 1-10.

Tyler, L.K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Voice, K., Stevens, T., Grant, J., Udwin,
O., Davies, M., Howlin, P.  (1997) Do individuals with Williams syndrome
have bizarre semantics?  Evidence for lexical organization using an on-line
task.  Cortex, 33, 515-527.