Michael Pereira

Children learn even when they're not paying attention, U of T psychologists find

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:30:10 +0000

Children learn even when they're not paying attention, U of T psychologists find

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 01/16/2025 - 10:30

Cutline

Children learn just as much whether they're trying to or not, while adults tend to ignore information they aren't paying attention to, according to a new study led by ��߲ݴ�ý psychologists (photo by Adobe Stock)

Michael Pereira

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Arts & Science

Psychology

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

“Don’t get mad at the little boy who’s doing jumping jacks while you’re reading a book"

Are you a parent or teacher frustrated that the children in your life can’t seem to pay attention when you’re trying to teach them something? You don’t need to be, say psychologists at the ��߲ݴ�ý.

New research from the department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science finds children learn just as much whether they’re trying to or not – adults, on the other hand, tend to ignore information that they aren’t paying attention to.

The findings are outlined in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science.

“Don’t get mad at the little boy who’s doing jumping jacks while you’re reading a book,” says the study’s senior author Amy Finn, associate professor in the department of psychology who leads the Learning and Neural Development lab. “He’s probably still listening and learning even though it doesn’t necessarily look like it.”

For the study, the research team – which included U of T alumni Marlie Tandoc, Bharat Nadendla and Theresa Pham – tested how much children and adults learned about drawings of common objects after two different experiments.

In the first, they told participants to pay attention to the drawings. In the second, participants were told to ignore the drawings and complete an entirely different task. After each scenario, participants had to identify fragments of the drawings they saw as quickly as possible.

They found that children learned about the drawings just as well across both scenarios, while adults learned more when told to pay attention to the drawings – in other words, the children’s learning wasn’t negatively impacted when they weren’t paying attention to the information they were tested on.

Children’s selective attention, or their ability to focus on a specific task and tune out distractions, develops slowly and doesn’t fully mature until early adulthood.

Previous research has found that unlike adults, a child’s brain treats information that they are told to pay attention to similarly to information they are not told to attend to. That is likely one of the reasons why children are so good at picking up languages spoken around them.

“As adults, we really filter what we’re learning through our goals and task demands, whereas kids are absorbing everything regardless of that – seemingly without even trying,” says Tandoc, former lab manager of the Learning and Neural Development lab and a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although returning to a child-like state of learning might sound appealing, selective attention does hold several benefits. Across experiments, attentional instruction was found to boost learning in adults. In other words, adults learn better when told what information is most important.

The research has the potential to influence how parents, teachers and curriculum designers think about how children and adults learn. For instance, for children, the findings underline the benefits of play and immersive learning. For adults, defining a clear task or goal at the beginning of a class or workshop is important for learning outcomes.

“For me, when I’m hanging out with my five-year-old, I’m less worried now than I was otherwise about whether or not he is learning something if it doesn’t seem like he is paying attention,” says Finn.

Why do we prefer curves over straight edges? Researchers probe the brain for clues

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:06:08 +0000

Why do we prefer curves over straight edges? Researchers probe the brain for clues

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 01/10/2025 - 12:06

Cutline

Researchers found regions in the brain that are sensitive to scenes people perceive to be curvy, but only when they are judging its beauty (supplied image)

Michael Pereira

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

Psychology

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

“Artists and designers are way ahead of scientists. They already use organic, curvy lines to evoke a sense of comfort, aesthetic pleasure and hominess”

For over 100 years, psychologists have known that most people prefer curviness over angularity in practically everything – from lines and shapes to faces, paintings and interior spaces.

Moreover, the phenomenon has been observed across cultures, in infants and even in great apes.

Yet, it remains unclear what it is about our perception of curvature that translates into this widespread preference.

“Now we have this advantage that we can probe the brain to see the mechanisms that are really driving this process,” says Oshin Vartanian, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the ��߲ݴ�ý who is appointed to Defence Research and Development Canada.

Using brain imaging data and computational measures of curvature, Vartanian worked with U of T PhD student Delaram Farzanfar, Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, a U of T associate professor of psychology, and an international group of collaborators to solve the mystery.

For the study, published recently in Scientific Reports, participants completed two tasks when presented with images of curvy and angular interior spaces. They judged each as either “beautiful” or “not beautiful” and decided whether they would choose to “enter” or “exit” the space.

Researchers found that there are regions in the brain that are sensitive to scenes participants perceive to be curvy, but only when they are judging its beauty. When a participant is asked to decide whether they would enter or exit the space, those regions are not sensitive to perceived curvature.

This observation suggests that the context within which we perceive curvature makes a difference in how our brain responds to it.

The regions of the brain that lit up to scenes participants perceive to be curvy, in the fusiform gyrus, are involved in higher-order visual processing like object recognition. They are also sensitive to the perception of faces.

In other words, these findings suggest that the region of our brain that specializes in distinguishing one face from another might also be sensitive to processing curvature in other contexts – such as looking at architectural spaces.

Examples of the experimental stimuli (n = 200). The stimuli in the top and bottom rows were categorized as “curvilinear” and “rectilinear” respectively by the two experts in Vartanian et al. The number underneath each stimulus represents its associated computational curvature value (supplied image)

Researchers also found that images of spaces that participants perceived as curvy did not always match with computational measures of those same spaces. However, a region in the primary visual cortex shows sensitivity to computational curvature, regardless of the task.

“It’s entirely possible that when a person looks at an image, they form a mental representation that’s three-dimensional,” Vartanian says. Such a representation eludes mathematical measurements of two-dimensional images.

Bernhardt-Walther adds that, going forward, researchers need to have a broader view of what parts of an image translate into a sense of curviness that people perceive as aesthetically pleasant.

“Artists and designers are way ahead of scientists. They already use organic, curvy lines to evoke a sense of comfort, aesthetic pleasure and hominess,” says Bernhardt-Walther. “Our work provides a scientific underpinning for their intuitions and may guide them on using curvature more deliberately as a design element to generate aesthetically pleasing forms or, alternatively, to use angularity to challenge and engage the viewers.”

Farzanfar, meanwhile, says the research is not only relevant to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, but to artists, designers, architects and city planners.

“I think as we understand how spaces impact our mood and cognition, we can create better environments for our health and enrich the experience of modern life for many people,” she says.

U of T astronomers and Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School collaborate on science programming for Indigenous students

rahul.kalvapalle — Tue, 14 May 2024 18:23:37 +0000

U of T astronomers and Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School collaborate on science programming for Indigenous students

rahul.kalvapalle Tue, 05/14/2024 - 14:23

Cutline

Students, teachers and caregivers from Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School gather with U of T astronomers to watch the April 8 total solar eclipse at Chiefswood Park on Six Nations of the Grand River (photo by Suresh Sivanandam)

Michael Pereira

Topic

Our Community

Indigenous Initiatives

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Indigenous

Truth and Reconciliation

Subheadline

The groundwork is currently being laid for a coding club and mentoring programs, among other initiatives

A group of astronomers from the ��߲ݴ�ý and students, teachers and caregivers from Toronto’s Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School recently shared a once-in-a-lifetime experience: witnessing a total solar eclipse.

The April 8 gathering, which took place in Chiefswood Park on Six Nations of the Grand River, saw the astronomers bring telescopes with solar filters that allowed viewers to observe sunspots and watch as the moon slowly eclipsed the sun. The event also served as a forum for young learners and community members to share traditional knowledge and ask plenty of questions.

It was one of many engagements planned as part of a partnership between U of T’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School, which was founded in 1977 and gives students from kindergarten to Grade 12 the opportunity to learn about Anishinaabe cultural traditions.

Totality at Chiefswood Park (photo by Kara Manovich)

In the future, there are also plans for a coding club, mentoring and tutoring programs, and training for teachers.

“Kâpapâmahchakwêw – Wandering Spirit School is grateful for the growing partnership with Dunlap because it provides an opportunity to practise reciprocity in knowledge sharing,” said Elise Twyford, the school’s principal. “The students and community learned about – and experienced – astrophysics and astronomy, and also had the opportunity to build their skills in sharing traditional knowledge and world views.

“I appreciate the care and thoughtfulness of the Dunlap and ��߲ݴ�ý team in collaborating with Kâpapâmahchakwêw students as partners in learning.”

The roots of the partnership stretch back to 2022 when Emma Stromberg, Indigenous partnership adviser at the Faculty of Arts & Science, and Associate Professor Susan Hill, director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies, approached Dunlap with an opportunity to work with teachers and students from Kâpapâmahchakwêw.

A close-up photo of the moon totally eclipsing the sun on April 8 above Chiefswood Park (photo by Suresh Sivanandam)

“We wanted to see if we could match up the needs and interests of the school to resources at U of T, to build something that can be sustained,” Stromberg says. “Consistent with U of T’s commitments to reconciliation, it is incumbent on all of us to think of ways to redress, in small and big ways, the impacts of settler colonialism and push resources into the community wherever possible.”

Some 20 members of the Dunlap community have since volunteered to help, with many of them recently participating in a workshop with John Croutch from the Office of Indigenous Initiatives to learn about the continued impacts of settler colonialism and what it means to be an ally to Indigenous Peoples.

The U of T astronomers said the opportunity to share a total solar eclipse was a memorable moment for everyone involved.

“You could hear lots of kids screaming in excitement and people gasping in awe at seeing totality,” said Associate Professor Suresh Sivanandam, interim director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. “When I walked out of there, I thought, ‘These are the moments in my job where I feel completely fulfilled because I helped other people experience the joy of astronomy.’”

Students recreate the total solar eclipse with paint and pastels on black paper (photo by Emma Stromberg)

Professor Roberto Abraham, chair of the faculty’s David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics, said he was the same age as some of the students when he first saw a total solar eclipse.

“It was magic,” he said. “Once you see a total solar eclipse, you won’t be the same person afterwards.”

Earlier this year, Sivanandam and Abraham visited the school to meet students, teachers and staff and hear about how astronomers at U of T can best support them.

For Twyford, the relationship with U of T immerses Kâpapâmahchakwêw students in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the classroom.

“I know that many students now see the wonder and possibility of these sciences and are even more motivated to continue their learning,” Twyford said. “It also helps to complement the traditional and cultural.”

'A black box in astronomy knowledge': PhD researcher probes the earliest stars in the universe

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 18:20:25 +0000

'A black box in astronomy knowledge': PhD researcher probes the earliest stars in the universe

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 03/26/2024 - 14:20

Cutline

PhD researcher Margaret Ikape presents at the Astronomy on Tap T.O. event (photo by Alicia Richardson)

Michael Pereira

Topic

Our Community

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Graduate Students

Space

Subheadline

Margaret Ikape is working to determine the properties of the first stars and how they influenced everything that followed

As a child, Margaret Ikape had a prime view of the stars from her hometown of Lagos, Nigeria.

“When I was really young, I saw a shooting star. And that got me looking up at the night sky a lot more,” Ikape says. She recalls thinking: “Can I count all the stars? Can I really go to a star? What would it be like if I could really go to a star? How long would it take?”

Today, Ikape is still looking at stars with the same curiosity, albeit ones that are much farther away. A PhD researcher at the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, she’s working to tell the story of the first stars in the universe, and how they influenced everything that followed.

Theory predicts that ultraviolet light from the first stars was so powerful that it ionized — or split — some of the first hydrogen atoms back into protons and electrons. This period of cosmic history is known as the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). During this time, the first stars and galaxies began to form, and with them, the universe as we know it today.

Ikape is working to determine the properties of these first stars, like how big they were and how long the reionization took. “That period is like a black box in astronomy knowledge. We know it happened, because the universe is ionized today, but we don’t know many details about it,” Ikape says.

A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years (image by NASA / WMAP Science Team)

Current optical telescopes cannot see back far enough to capture the EoR, so Ikape uses thousands of computer simulations to reimagine it and test theories in a kind of virtual sandbox shaped by what we know of the universe. Some of these simulations require significant processing power and must be run through the “Helen” computing cluster, named after renowned Canadian astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg.

Ikape also learns about the EoR by studying the first light emitted in the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). As light from the CMB travels to Earth, it passes through all that is between us and the point in cosmic history at which the CMB was emitted, approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Ikape can isolate how light from the CMB was impacted by the EoR and analyze it to tell us more about this time.

“Margaret’s work connects models and simulations of how the first stars in the universe lit up and ionized the surrounding gas with our observations of the cosmic microwave light—so she is the detective piecing the story together,” says Associate Professor Renée Hložek, Ikape’s PhD supervisor.

Ikape has forecasted that a new generation of telescopes will unlock more details about this mysterious period and the universe’s first stars, including the Simons Observatory and the fourth-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background experiment, or CMB-S4. She co-authored research that predicts that the CMB-S4 will help scientists close in on when the EoR began and how long it lasted.

A nine-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) heat map of temperature fluctuations in the CMB (photo by NASA/WMAP)

When she isn’t unpacking the mysteries of distant stars, Ikape is involved in outreach initiatives on the ground.

She’s an instructor with the Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers, a bi-annual school for emerging astronomers in Africa that aims to introduce astronomy undergraduate students to research practices and career avenues in the field, and participated in its inaugural program in Zambia in 2022.

In Toronto, Ikape was recently a speaker at Astronomy on Tap and has given presentations on astronomy at libraries, high schools and even a long-term care home.

“We are lucky to have students like Margaret at the Dunlap Institute; she combines her scientific curiosity with a passion for sharing what she learns with the broader community and training the next generation of bright minds,” Hložek says.

“The universe fascinates me a lot and I’m super excited every time I think about it," Ikape says. "So I think that everybody should know about it.”

U of T astronomers discover first population of binary stripped stars

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:22:31 +0000

U of T astronomers discover first population of binary stripped stars

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 12/20/2023 - 10:22

Cutline

Artist's impression of a massive star stripping the hydrogen envelope of its companion star in a binary system (illustration by Navid Marvi, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)

Michael Pereira

Topic

Breaking Research

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research and Innovation

Space

Subheadline

New findings confirm the existence of hot helium stars long thought to be at the heart of hydrogen-poor supernovae and neutron star mergers

Astronomers at the ��߲ݴ�ý have discovered a population of massive stars that have been stripped of their outer hydrogen layer by companion stars.

For over a decade, scientists have theorized that approximately one in three massive stars are stripped of their hydrogen envelope in binary systems (systems where two stars are gravitationally bound to one another). Yet, until now, only one possible candidate had been identified.

The findings, published in Science, shed light on the hot helium stars that are believed to be the origins of hydrogen-poor core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers.

“If it turned out that these stars are rare, then our whole theoretical framework for all these different phenomena is wrong, with implications for supernovae, gravitational waves and the light from distant galaxies,” said Maria Drout, assistant professor in the David A. Dunlap department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the ��߲ݴ�ý and an associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“This finding shows these stars really do exist.”

It also opens up possibilities for more detailed research going forward. “For example, predictions for how many neutron star mergers we should see are dependent on the properties of these stars, such as how much material comes off of them in stellar winds," Drout says. "Now, for the first time, we’ll be able to measure that, whereas people have been extrapolating it before."

Assistant Professor Maria Drout with the Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory (photo by Tom Holoien/Maria Drout)

Drout and her colleagues propose that these newly discovered stars will eventually explode as hydrogen-poor supernovae. These star systems are also thought to be necessary to form neutron star mergers.

In fact, the researchers believe that a few objects in their current sample are stripped stars with neutron star or blackhole companions. These objects are at the stage immediately before they become double-neutron-star or neutron-star-plus-blackhole systems that could eventually merge.

“Many stars are part of a cosmic dance with a partner, orbiting each other in a binary system. They’re not solitary giants but part of dynamic duos, interacting and influencing each other throughout their lifetimes,” says Bethany Ludwig, a PhD student in the David A. Dunlap department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and third author on the paper. “Our work sheds light on these fascinating relationships, revealing a universe that is far more interconnected and active than we previously imagined.

“Just as humans are social beings, stars too, especially the massive ones, are rarely alone.”

(Left to right): Bethany Ludwig, Anna O’Grady, Maria Drout and Ylva Götberg (all authors on the paper) at the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile (photo by Ylva Götberg)

As stars evolve and expand to become red giants, the hydrogen at the outer edges of one can be stripped by the gravitational pull of its companion star – leaving a very hot helium core exposed. The process can take tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years.

Stripped stars are difficult to find because much of the light they emit is outside of the visible light spectrum and can be obstructed by dust in the universe or outshone by their companion stars.

Drout and her collaborators began their search in 2016. Having studied hydrogen-poor supernovae during her PhD, Drout set out to find the stripped stars thought to be at the heart of these supernovae during a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellowship at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The researchers, who include co-author Ylva Götberg, assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, later designed a survey to look in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum where extremely hot stars emit most of their light. Using data from the Swift Ultra-Violet/Optical Telescope, they collected brightness data for millions of stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two of the closest galaxies to Earth.

Ludwig, who developed the first wide-field UV catalogue of the Magellanic Clouds, used UV photometry to detect systems with unusual UV emissions – signaling the possible presence of a stripped star.

The researchers used this ultraviolet dataset of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies to our own, to identify the candidate systems (image by NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State)

The team carried out a pilot study of 25 objects, obtaining optical spectroscopy with the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory between 2018 and 2022, and demonstrated that the stars were hot, small, hydrogen-poor, and in binary systems – all consistent with their model predictions.

Currently, the researchers are continuing to study the stars identified in the paper and expanding their search to find more. They will be looking both within our own Milky Way and nearby galaxies with approved programs on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Telescope, the Magellan Telescopes and the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

As part of this publication, all theoretical models and data used to identify these stars have been made public and available to other scientists.

Collaborating institutions include the ��߲ݴ�ý, the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and Steward Observatory.