Lecture by Prof. Victoria Leong

4 June 2025 10:30 - 12:00
Max Planck Institute
Auditorium 163
Lecture
Portrait photo Victoria Leong
Victoria Leong is Full Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Founding Director of the Early Mental Potential and Wellbeing Research (EMPOWER) Centre, Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition and Associate Dean (Outreach and Partnerships) of the Graduate College at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also Affiliated A/Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research examines the neural basis of the parent-offspring “social interactome”, across human and rodent species, in both healthy and disease models. She is a pioneer in the use of dyadic-EEG and in the development of culture-fair dyadic sociometric predictive models of infant cognition and developing executive function.

Title

Understanding early communication through the parent-child interactome  

 

Abstract

During early sensitive periods, healthy neurodevelopment depends on warm, contingent communication and social engagement between infants and caregivers. The timing and pattern of these interactions is crucial. Optimally, caregivers provide rich multisensory experiences in responsive and predictable temporal sequences to modulate their infants’ attention and emotion. This creates stable synchronous states, such as joint attention and shared positive affect, which potentiate communication and social knowledge transmission between adult and child. Even in pre-linguistic infants, natural pedagogy theory posits that multimodal ostensive signals such as eye contact, naming and pointing can transmit communicative intent effectively between adult and child, facilitating joint attention and referential learning. Using a dynamical systems approach, this early communication system can be situated within the deeper neurophysiological framework of the parent-child interactome. The interactome provides a systems level description of the parent and child’s joint neurophysiological and sensorimotor state space, created through interaction. In both human and animal optogenetic models, parent-offspring neural synchrony is associated with stable attractor states that support successful information transmission. Adult-child neural synchrony further mediates ostension, reflecting the child’s selection of information marked as relevant by their communicative partner. Moving from theory to real-world application, I introduce dyadic sociometrics, a technique for real-time multi-sensor AI-based analysis of the parent-child interactome (patent pending). This scalable technology is being deployed as a precise, culture-fair, deep phenotyping tool for early developmental assessment. In the first year of life, the parent-child interactome predicts emerging language, socioemotional and cognitive skills with up to 96% accuracy across different cultural contexts. I discuss future potential for interactome-based techniques to advance current understanding of neurodevelopment and sensitive periods, and to be used in early risk identification and personalised therapeutics.  

Website: Prof Victoria Leong Vik Ee | Academic Profile | DR-NTU | Research | NTU Singapore

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