About the Author
In the last 15 years, understanding of how the brain processes information has increased greatly as neuro-imaging techniques have been coupled with paradigms drawn from experimental psychology to investigate information processing in individuals with typical and disturbed brain development. My research applies the insights emerging from this research to understand how early disturbances in brain development, resulting from injury, genetically based developmental disorders, or atypical experiences such as chronic stress may influence information processing. I am interested in fundamental questions about human neuropsychological development, for example, the plasticity of different functional systems following early insult and/or atypical environmental experiences, and also in the application of the results of fundamental research to practical questions about how to optimize the development of children at heightened risk as a result of early insult and/or atypical environmental experiences. My current research focuses on the associations between anxiety, information processing and school learning. Many children experience high levels of anxiety, sometimes for lengthy periods as a result of divorce, illness in the family, teasing at school. Key questions are how anxiety affects the fundamental information processes, e.g. attention and memory, called on by school learning, how school learning can be protected in children experiencing high levels of anxiety, and whether interventions designed to manage the experience of anxiety reverse the effects of anxiety on information processing.
I am interested in developmental, comparative and evolutionary aspects of cognition. In our comparative lab group we are investigating the performance of children and primates on non-invasive behavioural tasks such as invisible displacement, imitation recognition, mirror self-recognition, planning, and means-ends reasoning. We conduct studies with chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, gibbons, and spider monkeys at various zoos in Australia, the USA and Indonesia. Young children are tested here in the Early Cognitive Development Centre in the School of Psychology.
John W. Santrock received his Ph.D. from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He has taught at the University of Charleston, the University of Georgia, and the University of Texas at Dallas. He has worked as a school psychologist and currently teaches educational psychology at the undergraduate level. In 2006, Dr. Santrock received the University of Texas at Dallas Excellence in Teaching Award. His research has included publications in the Journal of Educational Psychology on the contextual aspects of affectively toned cognition and children's self-regulatory behavior as well as teachers' perceptions of children from divorced families. He has been on the editorial boards of Developmental Psychology and Child Development. His publications include these exceptional McGraw-Hill texts: Child Development, 13th Edition; Life-Span Development, 14th Edition; Adolescence, 14th Edition; Psychology, 7th Edition; and Educational Psychology, 4th Edition.
