Notice Board

Psychology Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr. Afra Foroud (Department of Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge)

Title: Of Flow, Work and Play in Young Children

Bio:

Dr. Afra Foroud is interested in how the developmental processes involved in the organization, expression and function of movement in infants and young children, synthesize social and cognitive learning, communication, and language throughout the lifespan. In rodents, the consequential experiences of juvenile motor patterns during rough and tumble play, contribute to navigating social encounters during adulthood. In human infants, repetitive movement patterns help to integrate respiratory, oral, tactile, visual, proprioceptive, vestibular, spatial, inhibitory, learning and social systems during the developmental acquisition of functional goal-oriented tasks. The same infantile movement patterns rarely expressed in early childhood onwards, become expressed in adults with post-acute stroke, contributing to dysfunctional recovery and limiting independency. Afra’s current projects focus on the dynamic and integrative processes of work and play in preschool children. Prior to this, Afra held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University, where she began an examination of gestural and body actions within the contexts of language and spatial awareness in young and older adults. She continued to investigate this dynamic in young infants with a CIHR Fellowship at the University of British Columbia, and in adults with Parkinson’s disease in her work with the nationwide SSHRC funded Art for Social Change project. As part of this work, she developed studies on motor learning, social communication, and dance in people with Parkinson’s disease at the University of Calgary and Decidedly Jazz Danceworks. She is the Executive Director and Head of Schools of Lethbridge Montessori School Authority, on the faculty directorate of the Institute of Child and Youth Studies, and adjunct assistant professor of the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience of the University of Lethbridge.

Presented by the Department of Psychology and the PSYENCE Publishing Society

This session can be attend in person (SA8003) or via Zoom (https://uleth.zoom.us/j/98345884023)