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All are welcome to the Psychology Colloquia, where distinguished guest speakers present talks encompassing a diverse array of topics within the field of Psychology and beyond.
This week's speaker is Dr. Gina Mason. Dr. Mason is a senior postdoctoral fellow at the E.P. Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory, affiliated with Brown University's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour.
As a translational developmental scientist, Dr. Mason's work focuses on human sleep and its role in learning, brain, and behavioural health from infancy through first-time parenthood.
Prior to training at Brown, Dr. Mason attained a Bachelor of Science degree in molecular-cellular biology and psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she gained experience with sleep and neurodevelopmental research with Drs. Jamie Edgin and Lynn Nadel in the Down Syndrome Research Group.
Dr. Mason then completed her doctorate with Dr. Michael Goldstein at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a first a postdoctoral position with Dr. Rebecca Spencer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Among other sources, Dr. Mason's research and training has been funded by the National Science Foundation (DGE-1144153), the National Institutes of Health (T32HD055177), and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation (Bridge to Success).
Abstract: Human sleep from infancy to parenthood: Developmental changes, disruption, and implications for cognitive-behavioural health
Sleep is a universal, evolutionarily common behaviour that changes substantially across human development. While newborn infants worldwide sleep up to 14-20 hours per day in short 2-4 hour bouts, daytime sleep decreases rapidly across children's first years, with multiple daytime naps typically consolidating into one nap per day or fewer in early childhood. During adolescence, sleep is also marked by significant change as biological and social pressures drive adolescents to stay awake longer and later. And throughout pregnancy and new parenthood, sleep patterns are often irregular due to the myriad physical and hormonal changes that occur before birth, along with infants' care needs after birth. Yet, while it is known that sleep benefits cognitive and behavioural health across the lifespan, many questions are unanswered regarding how sleep disruption may impact sleep's benefits mechanistically, especially during these developmental periods of change in sleep patterns. In this talk, I will present research illuminating how short-term sleep pattern disruption in infancy may affect sleep's cognitive benefits. Moving to adolescence, I will then explore how sleep pattern disruption impacts the neural features of subsequent sleep, particularly those features regarded as important for cognitive and behavioural function. Finally, I will discuss how individual differences in sleep across late pregnancy and postpartum may predict parents' behavioural responses to emotional stimuli, possibly setting the stage for downstream parent-infant coregulatory effects. Together, these studies will underscore the implications of sleep for cognitive-behavioural health across diverse windows of human development.
The series is organised by Dr Goffredina Spano (g.spano@kingston.ac.uk) and Dr Simona Cantarella (s.cantarella@kingston.ac.uk) from the Psychology Department. If you would like more information about the event, please feel free to email either of them.
For further information about this event:
Contact: Lucy Raymond (Events Officer)
Email: lucy.raymond@kingston.ac.uk