John P Spencer

• PhD
• Professor at University of East Anglia

Executive functions (EFs) are core cognitive abilities that enable self-control and flexibility. EFs undergo transformational changes between 3 to 5 years of age; critically, individual differences in these abilities are predictive of longer-term outcomes. Thus, a key question is how EFs change in early development. This question is complicated by...

Caregiver-infant interactions shape infants' early visual experience; however, there is limited work from low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) in characterizing the visual cognitive dynamics of these interactions. Here, we present an innovative dyadic visual cognition pipeline using machine learning methods which captures, processes, and analyses...

The interaction of visual exploration and auditory processing is central to early cognitive development, supporting object discrimination, categorization, and word learning. Research has shown visual–auditory interactions to be complex, created from multiple processes and changing over multiple timescales. To better understand these interactions, w...

Stunting is associated with poor long-term cognitive, academic and economic outcomes, yet the mechanisms through which stunting impacts cognition in early development remain unknown. In a first-ever neuroimaging study conducted on infants from rural India, we demonstrate that stunting impacts a critical, early-developing cognitive system—visual wor...

The language environment to which children are exposed has an impact on later language abilities as well as on brain development; however, it is unclear how early such impacts emerge. This study investigates the effects of children’s early language environment and socioeconomic status (SES) on brain structure in infancy at 6 and 30 months of age (b...

Background: Poor air quality has been linked to cognitive deficits in children, but this relationship has not been examined in the first year of life when brain growth is at its peak. Methods: We measured in-home air quality focusing on particulate matter with diameter of <2.5 μm (PM2.5) and infants' cognition longitudinally in a sample of famil...

Poor air quality has been linked to cognitive deficits in children, but this relationship has not been examined in the first year of life when brain growth is at its peak.

Over the last several years, the study of working memory (WM) for simple visual features (e.g., colors, orientations) has been dominated by perspectives that assume items in WM are stored independently of one another. Evidence has revealed, however, systematic biases in WM recall which suggest that items in WM interact during active maintenance. In...

Poor air quality has been linked to cognitive deficits in children, but this relationship has not been examined in the first year of life when brain growth is at its peak. We measured in-home air quality focusing on particulate matter with diameter of <2.5 μm (PM2.5) and infants’ cognition longitudinally in a sample of families from rural India. Ai...

The language environment to which children are exposed has an impact on later language and cognitive abilities as well as on brain development; however, it is unclear how early such impacts emerge. This study investigates the effects of children’s early language environment and socioeconomic status (SES) on brain structure in infancy at both 6 and...

A key question in early development is how changes in neural systems give rise to changes in infants' behavior. We examine this question by testing predictions of a dynamic field (DF) model of infant spatial attention. We tested 5‐, 7‐, and 10‐month‐old infants in the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task containing the original non‐competiti...

Few studies have investigated the neural mechanisms underlying speech production in children who stutter (CWS), despite the critical importance of understanding these mechanisms closer to the time of stuttering onset. The relative contributions of speech planning and execution in CWS therefore are also unknown. Using functional near-infrared spectr...

Infants, children, and adults have been shown to track co-occurrence across ambiguous naming situations to infer the referents of new words. The extensive literature on this cross-situational word learning (CSWL) ability has produced support for two theoretical accounts-associative learning (AL) and hypothesis testing (HT)-but no comprehensive mode...

Significance: Image reconstruction of fNIRS data is a useful technique for transforming channel-based fNIRS into a volumetric representation and managing spatial variance based on optode location. We present an innovative integrated pipeline for image reconstruction of fNIRS data using either MRI templates or individual anatomy. Aim: We demonstrate...

Flexibly shifting attention between stimulus dimensions (e.g., shape and color) is a central component of regulating cognition for goal-based behavior. In the present report, we examine the functional roles of different cortical regions by manipulating two demands on task switching that have been confounded in previous studies—shifting attention be...

In their 2007b Psychological Review paper, Xu and Tenenbaum found that early word learning follows the classic logic of the “suspicious coincidence effect:” when presented with a novel name (‘fep’) and three identical exemplars (three Labradors), word learners generalized novel names more narrowly than when presented with a single exemplar (one Lab...

There is consensus that activation within distributed functional brain networks underlies human thought. The impact of this consensus is limited, however, by a gap that exists between data-driven correlational analyses that specify where functional brain activity is localized using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neural process ac...

Significance: Image reconstruction of fNIRS data is a useful technique for transforming channel-based fNIRS into a volumetric representation and managing spatial variance based on optode location. We present a novel integrated pipeline for image reconstruction of fNIRS data using either MRI templates or individual anatomy. Aim: We demonstrate a pip...

Working memory is a central cognitive system that plays a key role in development, with working memory capacity and speed of processing increasing as children move from infancy through adolescence. Here, I focus on two questions: What neural processes underlie working memory, and how do these processes change over development? Answers to these ques...

Visual working memory (VWM) is a central cognitive system used to compare views of the world and detect changes in the local environment. This system undergoes dramatic development in the first two years; however, we know relatively little about the functional organization of VWM at the level of the brain. Here, we used image-based functional near-...

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce concepts of dynamic field theory (DFT), a continuous attractor neural network, and its implementation of visual working memory (VWM). In DFT, WM is an attractor state where representations are self-sustained through strong interactions between self-excitation and lateral inhibition. We discuss a VW...

Infants, children and adults have been shown to track co-occurrence across ambiguous naming situations to infer the referents of new words. The extensive literature on this cross-situational word learning (CSWL) ability has produced support for two theoretical accounts — associative learning (AL) and hypothesis testing (HT) — but no comprehensive m...

Trends toward encephalization and technological complexity ∼1.8 million years ago may signify cognitive development in the genus Homo. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we measured relative brain activity of 33 human subjects at three different points as they learned to make replicative Oldowan and Acheulian Early Stone Age tools. Here w...

Our study aimed to determine the neural correlates of speech planning and execution in adults who stutter (AWS). Fifteen AWS and 15 controls (CON) completed two tasks that either manipulated speech planning or execution processing loads. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure changes in blood flow concentrations during ea...

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioral development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain plastici...

In the original article, the legend within Fig. 3 incorrectly read as ‘*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p > 0.01’. This has now been changed to ‘*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01’. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article. The authors would like to apologise for this error.

Background: The literature on brain imaging in premature infants is mostly made up of studies that evaluate neonates, yet the most dynamic time of brain development happens from birth to 1 year of age. This study was designed to obtain quantitative brain measures from magnetic resonance imaging scans of infants born prematurely at 12 months of age...

A proper representation of space and a joint attention mechanism are indispensable for an effective deictic communication with embodied agents. Taking inspiration from developmental psychology may help us to tackle computational challenges for robots. Although some developmental joint attention models for robots have already been proposed, to the b...

Motion artifacts are often a significant component of the measured signal in functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiments. A variety of methods have been proposed to address this issue, including principal components analysis (PCA), correlation-based signal improvement (CBSI), wavelet filtering, and spline interpolation. The efficacy o...

Executive function (EF) is a key cognitive process that emerges in early childhood and facilitates children's ability to control their own behavior. Individual differences in EF skills early in life are predictive of quality-of-life outcomes 30 years later (Moffitt et al., 2011). What changes in the brain give rise to this critical cognitive abilit...

Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas 4...

Previous neuroimaging studies have reported a posterior to anterior shift of activation in ageing (PASA). Here, we explore the nature of this shift by modulating load (1,2 or 3 items) and perceptual complexity in two variants of a visual working memory task (VWM): a ‘simple’ color and a ‘complex’ shape change detection task. Functional near-infrare...

After 800,000 years of making simple Oldowan tools, early humans began manufacturing Acheulian handaxes around 1.75 million years ago. This advance is hypothesized to reflect an evolutionary change in hominin cognition and language abilities. We used a neuroarchaeology approach to investigate this hypothesis, recording brain activity using function...

To behave adaptively in complex and dynamic environments, one must link perception and action to satisfy internal states, a process known as response selection (RS). A largely unexplored topic in the study of RS is how interstimulus and interresponse similarity affect performance. To examine this issue, we manipulated stimulus similarity by using c...

In the current study, we extend a previous methodological pipeline by adding a novel image reconstruction approach to move functional near-infrared (fNIRS) signals from channel-space on the surface of the head to voxel-space within the brain volume. We validate this methodology by comparing voxel-wise fNIRS results to functional magnetic resonance...

A fundamental challenge in cognitive neuroscience is to develop theoretical frameworks that effectively span the gap between brain and behavior, between neuroscience and psychology. Here, we attempt to bridge this divide by formalizing an integrative cognitive neuroscience approach using dynamic field theory (DFT). We begin by providing an overview...

For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in-the-moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this dy...

Visual working memory (VWM) is a key cognitive system that enables people to hold visual information in mind after a stimulus has been removed and compare past and present to detect changes that have occurred. VWM is severely capacity limited to around 3-4 items, although there are robust individual differences in this limit. Importantly, these ind...

Studies examining the relationship between spatial attention and spatial working memory (SWM) have shown that discrimination responses are faster for targets appearing at locations that are being maintained in SWM, and that location memory is impaired when attention is withdrawn during the delay. These observations support the proposal that sustain...

Rule representation refers to the processes that construct and maintain associations between stimuli and responses in the service of guiding task-relevant actions in context. Rule representation relies on an extensive network of frontal, temporal, parietal, and subcortical regions, with heavy involvement of the prefrontal cortex, a region that is w...

This chapter expands the concepts of dynamic field theory (DFT) to activation distributions over multidimensional spaces. Multidimensional fields can be used either to represent inherently multidimensional features or for bringing different feature dimensions together in a single, integrated representation. Such integrated representations are costl...

Temporal ordering of events is biased, or influenced, by perceptual organization-figure-ground organization-and by spatial attention. For example, within a region assigned figural status or at an attended location, onset events are processed earlier (Lester, Hecht, & Vecera, 2009; Shore, Spence, & Klein, 2001), and offset events are processed for l...

Recent evidence has sparked debate about the neural bases of response selection and inhibition. In the current study, we employed two reactive inhibition tasks, the Go/Nogo (GnG) and Simon tasks, to examine questions central to these debates. First, we investigated whether a fronto-cortical-striatal system was sensitive to the need for inhibition p...

Adults who stutter (AWS) show robust over-activation of right hemisphere structures during speech production relative to adults who do not stutter (AWNS). This is well documented in the fMRI literature in stuttering. These differences are often interpreted as risk factors for the development of stuttering, however, it remains unclear whether differ...

Infant visual attention develops rapidly over the first year of life, significantly altering the way infants respond to peripheral visual events. Here, we present data from 5-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants using the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task, designed to capture developmental changes in visual spatial attention and saccade plannin...

Marr's seminal work laid out a program of research by specifying key questions for cognitive science at different levels of analysis. Because dynamic systems theory (DST) focuses on time and interdependence of components, DST research programs come to very different conclusions regarding the nature of cognitive change. We review a specific DST appr...

Executive functions enable flexible thinking, something young children are notoriously bad at. For instance, in the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task, 3-year-olds can sort cards by one dimension (shape), but continue to sort by this dimension when asked to switch (to color). This study tests a prediction of a dynamic neural field model that...

The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges of psychological research in addressing the mechanisms of emergence: how new behavioral patterns and cognitive abilities arise from the interaction of an organism with its environment in real time. We review some of the empirical studies on infant development with reference to Dynamical Systems...

Recent psychophysical experiments have shown that working memory for visual surface features interacts with saccadic motor planning, even in tasks where the saccade target is unambiguously specified by spatial cues. Specifically, a match between a memorized color and the color of either the designated target or a distractor stimulus influences sacc...

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a key role in visual cognition, comparing percepts and identifying changes in the world as they occur. Previously, fMRI has identified activation in frontal, parietal and temporal areas involved in VWM. Here, we conducted a cross-modal neuroimaging study to determine whether functional near-infrared spectroscopy (f...

It is unclear how children learn labels for multiple overlapping categories such as “Labrador,” “dog,” and “animal.” Xu and Tenenbaum (2007a) suggested that learners infer correct meanings with the help of Bayesian inference. They instantiated these claims in a Bayesian model, which they tested with preschoolers and adults. Here, we report data tes...

Early childhood is a time of rapid change in the organization of cognition. The period between 2 and 5 years is particularly dramatic, including the transition into formal schooling, the acquisition of language and mathematical abilities, learning to take the perspective of others in social interactions, and learning to appropriately adapt behavior...

People are typically slower when executing two tasks than when only performing a single task. These dual-task costs are initially robust but are reduced with practice. Dux et al. (2009) explored the neural basis of dual-task costs and learning using fMRI. Inferior frontal junction (IFJ) showed a larger hemodynamic response on dual-task trials compa...

Theories of the development of EF face several challenges. First, EF consists of multiple component processes; thus, theories of EF must explain how each component develops and how these components differentiate and interact over development. Second, theories must bridge the gap between brain and behavior. Here, we describe a Dynamic Field Theory (...

What motivates children to radically transform themselves during early development? We addressed this question in the domain of infant visual exploration. Over the first year, infants' exploration shifts from familiarity to novelty seeking. This shift is delayed in preterm relative to term infants and is stable within individuals over the course of...

The study of looking dynamics and discrimination form the backbone of developmental science and are central processes in theories of infant cognition. Looking dynamics and discrimination change dramatically across the 1st year of life. Surprisingly, developmental changes in looking and discrimination have not been studied together. Recent simulatio...

Efficient visually-guided behavior depends on our ability to form, retain, and compare visual representations separated in space and time. This ability relies on visual working memory (VWM). Although research has begun to shed light on the neuro-cognitive systems subserving VWM, few theories have addressed these processes in a neurally-grounded fra...

Word learning is a complex phenomenon because it is tied to many different behaviors that are linked to multiple perceptual and cognitive systems. Further, recent research suggests that the course of word learning builds from effects at the level of individual referent selection or noun generalization decisions that accumulate on a moment-to-moment...

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics o...

We examine the contributions of dynamic systems theory to the field of cognitive development, focusing on modeling using dynamic neural fields. After introducing central concepts of dynamic field theory (DFT), we probe empirical predictions and findings around two examples—the DFT of infant perseverative reaching that explains Piaget's A-not-B erro...

The ability to dynamically track moving objects in the environment is crucial for efficient interaction with the local surrounds. Here, we examined this ability in the context of the multi-object tracking (MOT) task. Several theories have been proposed to explain how people track moving objects; however, only one of these previous theories is imple...

Objects are composed of various surface features such as color and shape. The visual system codes many of these features in distinct neuronal populations. Yet we normally perceive objects as coherent wholes rather than seeing aggregations of unrelated features. This suggests the existence of an integrative process conjoining visual features. Psycho...

Human activity and thought is embedded within and richly structured by space. The spatial mind has detailed knowledge of the world that surrounds it?it remembers where objects are, what they are, and how they are arranged relative to one another. It can navigate through spaces to locate and retrieve objects, or it can direct the actions of others t...

The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task requires children to switch from sorting cards based on shape or color to sorting based on the other dimension. Typically, 3-year-olds perseverate, whereas 4-year-olds flexibly sort by different dimensions. Zelazo and colleagues (1996, Cognitive Development, 11, 37-63) asked children questions about the...

Humans and objects, and thus social interactions about objects, exist within space. Words direct listeners' attention to specific regions of space. Thus, a strong correspondence exists between where one looks, one's bodily orientation, and what one sees. This leads to further correspondence with what one remembers. Here, we present data suggesting...

This article reviews the major contributions of dynamic systems theory in advancing thinking about development, the empirical insights the theory has generated, and the key challenges for the theory on the horizon. The first section discusses the emergence of dynamic systems theory in developmental science, the core concepts of the theory, and the...

Visual working memory (VWM) capacity has been studied extensively in adults, and methodological advances have enabled researchers to probe capacity limits in infancy using a preferential looking paradigm. Evidence suggests that capacity increases rapidly between 6 and 10 months of age. To understand how the VWM system develops, we must understand t...

One of the fundamental questions in cognitive science is how people remember the locations of important objects in the world with enough accuracy to find these objects when they are no longer in view. Evidence from a variety of studies suggests that people rely on visible reference axes—streets, walls, the edges of a table—to help them remember the...

Neoconstructivism is a new approach in developmental science that sheds light on the processes underlying change over time. The present commentary evaluates this new approach in the context of existing theories of development and nine central tenets of neoconstructivism proposed by Newcombe (2011). For inspiration, Hull's evaluation of psychologica...

According to Jones & Love (J&L), Bayesian theories are too often isolated from other theories and behavioral processes. Here, we highlight examples of two types of isolation from the field of word learning. Specifically, Bayesian theories ignore emergence, critical to development theory, and have not probed the behavioral details of several key phe...

A major debate in the study of word learning centers on the extension of categories to new items. The rational approach assumes that learners make structured inferences about category membership, whereas the mechanistic approach emphasizes the attentional and memory processes that form the basis of generalization behaviors. Recent support for the r...

We propose a neural dynamic model that specifies how low-level visual processes can be integrated with higher level cognition to achieve flexible spatial language behaviors. This model uses real-word visual input that is linked to relational spatial descriptions through a neural mechanism for reference frame transformations. We demonstrate that the...

We present an architecture based on the Dynamic Field Theory for the problem of scene representation. At the core of this architecture are three-dimensional neural fields linking feature to spatial information. These three-dimensional fields are coupled to lower-dimensional fields that provide both a close link to the sensory surface and a close li...

In a recent line of psychophysical experiments, we found that working memory for a surface feature (color) interacts dynamically with saccadic motor planning, even if subjects are instructed to make saccades based only on spatial cues. A match between the remembered color and the color of either the designated target or a distractor influences sacc...

Change detection tasks typically estimate adults' visual working memory (VWM) capacity to be 3–4 simple objects. To explore how capacity limits arise within a neural system, we used a dynamic neural field model of VWM to capture performance in change detection. In this model, objects are represented as “peaks” of activation that are maintained in c...

This study investigates whether inductive processes influencing spatial memory performance generalize to supervised learning scenarios with differential feedback. After providing a location memory response in a spatial recall task, participants received visual feedback showing the target location. In critical blocks, feedback was systematically bia...

All sciences use models of some variety to understand complex phenomena. In developmental science, however, modeling is mostly limited to linear, algebraic descriptions of behavioral data. Some researchers have suggested that complex mathematical models of developmental phenomena are a viable (even necessary) tool that provide fertile ground for de...

In early childhood, there is a developmental transition in spatial memory biases. Before the transition, children's memory responses are biased toward the midline of a space, while after the transition responses are biased away from midline. The Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) posits that changes in neural interaction and changes in how children perceiv...

The Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) task has been a central tool for studying object-based attention and the nature of the connection between on-line percepts and the location of objects in a scene. Despite a long empirical tradition, there are few formal models that specify the processes that underlie performance in this dynamic task. Here we propose...

There is general agreement that some form of sustained activation is the most plausible neuronal substrate for maintenance in working memory (WM). In the present study, we describe a dynamic neural field (DNF) model of WM that achieves a stable memory state through locally excitatory and laterally inhibitory interactions among feature-selective pop...

Research based on the Category Adjustment model concluded that the spatial distribution of target locations does not influence location estimation responses [Huttenlocher, J., Hedges, L., Corrigan, B., & Crawford, L. E. (2004). Spatial categories and the estimation of location. Cognition, 93, 75-97]. This conflicts with earlier results showing that...

It's in the Eye of the Beholder: Spatial Language and Spatial Memory Use the Same Perceptual Reference Frames Lipinski et al.Spatial language provides an effective domain to examine the connection between non-linguistic and linguistic systems because it is an unambiguous case of linguistic and sensori-motor systems coming together. In the present w...

This study tested a dynamic field theory (DFT) of spatial working memory and an associated spatial precision hypothesis (SPH). Between 3 and 6 years of age, there is a qualitative shift in how children use reference axes to remember locations: 3-year-olds' spatial recall responses are biased toward reference axes after short memory delays, whereas...

The present study addresses the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic spatial representations. In three experiments we probe spatial language and spatial memory at the same time points in the task sequence. Experiments 1 and 2 show analogous delay-dependent biases in spatial language and spatial memory. Experiment 3 extends this corres...

Topál et al. (Reports, 26 September 2008, p. 1831) proposed that infants' perseverative search errors can be explained by ostensive cues from the experimenter. We use the dynamic field theory to test the proposal that infants encode locations more weakly when social cues are present. Quantitative simulations show that this account explains infants'...

The nativist-empiricist debate and the nativist commitment to the idea of core knowledge and endowments that exist without relevant postnatal experience continue to distract attention from the reality of developmental systems. The developmental systems approach embraces the concept of epigenesis, that is, the view that development emerges via casca...

Many everyday tasks rely on our ability to hold information about a perceived stimulus in mind after that stimulus is no longer visible and to compare this information with incoming perceptual information. This ability has been shown to rely on a short-term form of visual memory that has come to be known as visual working memory. Research and theor...