In spring 2025, cognitive neuroscience doctoral student Kelly Hiersche won the Department of Psychology’s Herbert A. Toops Prize for Creativity for her work on children’s language development.
Kelly Hiersche
Doctoral Student, Cognitive Neuroscience
In spring 2025, cognitive neuroscience doctoral student Kelly Hiersche won the Department of Psychology’s Herbert A. Toops Prize for Creativity. In this video, Hiersche shares her prize-winning research, which looks at the brain mechanisms involved in children’s language development.
References
Language localizer:
Fedorenko, E., Hsieh, P.-J., Nieto-Castañón, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Kanwisher, N. (2010). New method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104(2), 1177–1194. DOI.
MD localizer:
Diachek, E., Blank, I., Siegelman, M., Affourtit, J., & Fedorenko, E. (2020). The domain-general multiple demand (MD) network does not support core aspects of language comprehension: A large-scale fMRI investigation. Journal of Neuroscience, 40(23), 4536–4550. DOI.
Hiersche, K. J., Schettini, E., Li, J., & Saygin, Z. M. (2024). Functional dissociation of the language network and other cognition in early childhood. Human Brain Mapping, 45(9), e26757. DOI.
Schettini, E., Hiersche, K. J., & Saygin, Z. M. (2023). Individual variability in performance reflects selectivity of the multiple demand network among children and adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(11), 1940–1951. DOI.
Learn more about the Saygin Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab (Z-Lab) at zeynepsaygin.com.