The Mind's Playground

Families often worry about how much time children spend playing videogames, but what does the science say about children’s digital play and their wellbeing? Dr Fiona Scott explains what drives children’s digital play and how it connects with their wellbeing, drawing on LEGO Foundation funded research with 6-12 year old children and their families in the UK, South Africa, Cyprus and Australia. Audience members can also take part in a quiz to uncover their own ‘digital play drivers’.

Just as when children learn to speak, young songbirds learn to sing by trying to copy the adults around them. Their songs are like sentences, consisting of vocabulary and following certain grammar. Dr Hazem Toutounji will discuss his research which is trying to understand how the young of a species of songbirds called the zebra finch learn their song vocabulary, using clever experiments and computer models.

At any given moment our senses are bombarded by an overabundance of information, much more than our conscious mind can handle. Our attention helps us manage this load and separate what’s important from what is not. But our attention is not as perfect as we would like it to be. Whether trying to write a paper, read a book, or drive a car, we are sometimes swamped with irrelevant information while the important bits slip away. We will explore the basic principles that guide attention, conduct some experiments that exemplify its limits, and find out if these limits are hard-wired, or if there is anything we can do to help us overcome them.