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"Marshall, Chloe"
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Oxytocin neurons enable social transmission of maternal behaviour
Maternal care, including by non-biological parents, is important for offspring survival
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. Oxytocin
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, which is released by the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), is a critical maternal hormone. In mice, oxytocin enables neuroplasticity in the auditory cortex for maternal recognition of pup distress
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. However, it is unclear how initial parental experience promotes hypothalamic signalling and cortical plasticity for reliable maternal care. Here we continuously monitored the behaviour of female virgin mice co-housed with an experienced mother and litter. This documentary approach was synchronized with neural recordings from the virgin PVN, including oxytocin neurons. These cells were activated as virgins were enlisted in maternal care by experienced mothers, who shepherded virgins into the nest and demonstrated pup retrieval. Virgins visually observed maternal retrieval, which activated PVN oxytocin neurons and promoted alloparenting. Thus rodents can acquire maternal behaviour by social transmission, providing a mechanism for adapting the brains of adult caregivers to infant needs via endogenous oxytocin.
Behavioural studies and neural recordings in mice show that virgin mice can acquire maternal behaviour through an oxytocin-dependent mechanism.
Journal Article
Neural circuitry for maternal oxytocin release induced by infant cries
Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is important for maternal physiology and childcare, including parturition and milk ejection during nursing
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. Suckling triggers the release of oxytocin, but other sensory cues—specifically, infant cries—can increase the levels of oxytocin in new human mothers
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, which indicates that cries can activate hypothalamic oxytocin neurons. Here we describe a neural circuit that routes auditory information about infant vocalizations to mouse oxytocin neurons. We performed in vivo electrophysiological recordings and photometry from identified oxytocin neurons in awake maternal mice that were presented with pup calls. We found that oxytocin neurons responded to pup vocalizations, but not to pure tones, through input from the posterior intralaminar thalamus, and that repetitive thalamic stimulation induced lasting disinhibition of oxytocin neurons. This circuit gates central oxytocin release and maternal behaviour in response to calls, providing a mechanism for the integration of sensory cues from the offspring in maternal endocrine networks to ensure modulation of brain state for efficient parenting.
Experiments in mice identify a neural circuit that relays information about infant cries from the maternal auditory thalamus to hypothalamic oxytocin neurons to induce the release of oxytocin and modulate maternal behaviour.
Journal Article
Spelling Errors in French Elementary School Students: A Linguistic Analysis
Purpose: This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the \"universality\" of POMAS and its suitability to track development in French spelling. Method: One hundred ninety-four typically developing French children (Grades 1-5) produced a written narrative and words-to-dictation. These were analyzed for productivity and accuracy. Misspellings were then analyzed using POMAS-FR. Results: Productivity and accuracy were better in the later grades. POMAS-FR provided a novel framework for tracking error types in our French sample. The data showed a linear trend for text production, whereby the proportion of phonological errors decreased rapidly in the early grades, while orthographic errors decreased and morphological errors increased throughout elementary school. Words-to-dictation showed a more stable pattern, with a steady decrease in phonological errors, and a stable proportion of orthographic and morphological errors. The specific error types found within each linguistic category are described for both tasks. Conclusions: The POMAS-FR allowed for the characterization of linguistic knowledge involved in learning to spell French across elementary school. Interplays between different types of linguistic knowledge were evident at all grades. In comparison with other writing systems, French text spelling competence relied heavily on morphological knowledge. These results suggest POMAS may be applied to other orthographic systems. It also highlights the importance of task and word selection for the qualitative evaluation of spelling.
Journal Article
Innate and plastic mechanisms for maternal behaviour in auditory cortex
Infant cries evoke powerful responses in parents
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. Whether parental animals are intrinsically sensitive to neonatal vocalizations, or instead learn about vocal cues for parenting responses is unclear. In mice, pup-naive virgin females do not recognize the meaning of pup distress calls, but retrieve isolated pups to the nest after having been co-housed with a mother and litter
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. Distress calls are variable, and require co-caring virgin mice to generalize across calls for reliable retrieval
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. Here we show that the onset of maternal behaviour in mice results from interactions between intrinsic mechanisms and experience-dependent plasticity in the auditory cortex. In maternal females, calls with inter-syllable intervals (ISIs) from 75 to 375 milliseconds elicited pup retrieval, and cortical responses were generalized across these ISIs. By contrast, naive virgins were neuronally and behaviourally sensitized to the most common (‘prototypical’) ISIs. Inhibitory and excitatory neural responses were initially mismatched in the cortex of naive mice, with untuned inhibition and overly narrow excitation. During co-housing experiments, excitatory responses broadened to represent a wider range of ISIs, whereas inhibitory tuning sharpened to form a perceptual boundary. We presented synthetic calls during co-housing and observed that neurobehavioural responses adjusted to match these statistics, a process that required cortical activity and the hypothalamic oxytocin system. Neuroplastic mechanisms therefore build on an intrinsic sensitivity in the mouse auditory cortex, and enable rapid plasticity for reliable parenting behaviour.
The onset of maternal behaviour in mice involves an interaction between intrinsic tuning of auditory cortical neurons and experience-dependent plasticity.
Journal Article
Teachers’ reported practices for teaching writing in England
To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers’ approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the ‘simple view of writing’ as a framework to examine the extent to which different aspects of the writing process are addressed. One hundred and eighty-eight staff from ten different schools responded to an online questionnaire. Only the data from class teachers (n = 88) who responded to all items on the questionnaire were included in the final analyses. Respondents enjoyed teaching writing and felt prepared to teach it. However, despite feeling that they were effective in identifying approaches to support students’ writing, nearly half reported that supporting struggling writers was problematic for them. Overall teachers reported more work at word level, occurring several times a week, than with transcription, sentence or text levels, which were reported to occur weekly. Planning, reviewing and revising occurred least often, only monthly. For these variables no differences were found between teachers of younger (age 4–7) and older students (age 8–11). By contrast, an examination of specific aspects of each component revealed differences between the teachers of the two age groups. Teachers of younger students focused more frequently on phonic activities related to spelling, whereas teachers of older students focussed more on word roots, punctuation, word classes and the grammatical function of words, sentence-level work, and paragraph construction.
Journal Article
Montessori education: a review of the evidence base
The Montessori educational method has existed for over 100 years, but evaluations of its effectiveness are scarce. This review paper has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). The goal of the paper is therefore to provide a review of the evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.
Journal Article
Word production errors in children with developmental language impairments
This review focuses on the errors that children with developmental language impairments make on three types of word production tasks: lexical retrieval, the elicitation of derivationally complex forms and the repetition of non-sense forms. The studies discussed in this review come principally from children with specific language impairment, and from children who are English-speakers or deaf users of British sign language. It is argued that models of word production need to be able to account for the data presented here, and need to have explanatory power across both modalities (i.e. speech and sign).
Journal Article
Publisher Correction: Innate and plastic mechanisms for maternal behaviour in auditory cortex
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Journal Article
Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task
We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently.
Journal Article