Alter an adult owl’s environment, and it has difficulty telling what’s different. But do something similar to a juvenile—“and they figure it out like that,” says Eric Knudsen, snapping his fingers.
A professor of neurobiology at the School of Medicine who has studied learning mechanisms in barn owls for decades, Knudsen serves on the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. The council’s 16 members and contributing members—who specialize in everything from psychology to pediatrics to communication—are looking for cost-effective ways to invest in human capital. Their initial conclusion: helping children in their earliest years is the way to go.
Knudsen is first author of the council’s most recent working paper, “Economic, neurobiological and behavioral perspectives on building America’s future workforce,” published in the June 27 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Studies show us that it’s disadvantaged kids, who are a growing proportion of our future society, who benefit the most from interventions,” he says. “If you expose kids to a rich, full environment early on, that builds for their future learning and they become more confident, more able to learn more. But if you don’t have early learning, the effect of later influences has little impact because you don’t have the foundation to build on.”
A lot can be learned by sitting at a table with scientists from other fields, Knudsen says. Findings by child psychologists, for example, echo what Knudsen has discovered in his research about how the brain develops. The brain lays down circuits that process basic signals like hearing and vision very early in life. “And higher-order circuits, like the ones that support language, require good performance at the lower-level circuits.”
Similarly, Knudsen recalls a meeting where he and fellow member James Heckman, a University of Chicago economist and 2000 Nobel laureate, were talking about their research. “We were both giving the same story, [but] with completely different data sets,” Knudsen recalls. “He was talking about the economics of investing in children in terms of education, and I was talking about the effects of early experience on changing the architecture of the brain.”
In the recent PNAS paper, the council’s specialists cite evidence from many academic fields that the best way to prepare for a flexible workforce that can learn new skills is by investing in “the social and cognitive environments of children who are disadvantaged, beginning as early as possible.” The report defines disadvantaged children as those from homes where there is limited parent education, parental mental health problems, deprivation, neglect or violence, and it recommends that these children be provided with “attentive, nurturing, stable relationships with invested adults” in early childhood.
Knudsen says the council strives to be “completely apolitical,” but will act as a broker of knowledge. “If some legislator wants to understand why it would be more effective to put his dollars into the first year of life, versus the fifth year of life, we won’t tell him to do it—we’ll just tell him what he gets, what the probabilities are of what’s going to happen.”
