The Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development

01/21/2024

Trivia night. Second place! Go team Pedro (Pascale-the last of us)

10/31/2023

LNCD Halloween Party with prizes!🎃

07/30/2023

Good luck Orma on the next amazing step of yoy career! We will miss you so much!

07/30/2023

Good luck Orma on you next step. We will miss you so much in the lab!

04/24/2023

Come join us to help inform the scientific community about development! Participants are compensated for their time, and parking is validated!

04/17/2020

Dr. Luna helps to explain the risk-taking behaviors of teens that are continuing despite the threat of Covid-19.

“Adolescence is not a disease. It’s an amazing time of life that we have to understand so we can make it the best possible,” Pittsburgh researcher Dr. Beatriz Luna looks at the teenage brain.

03/26/2020

from the Flux Society:
As scientists across the world are closing their labs, moving to remote access, and stopping human testing to curb the spread of COVID-19, we may be discouraged about our ability to proceed with our scientific pursuits. We are all going through a process of impactful resetting of expectations regarding research plans, and understandably many of us may be feeling discouraged, stressed, disappointed, frustrated, and anxious. For many the months ahead are now focused on a shift from data collection to critical theory building, analytics, and writing, as well as finding new ways to connect and communicate around science. This may be particularly disruptive for students, postdocs and junior faculty. As such, we recognize that this might impact plans for what to expect in September. As a Flux community, we are committed to adapting to this together and supporting one another by committing to a September meeting (live or virtual), sharing stories about creative adaptations and challenges in research and life as a researchers in these challenging times, and finding novel ways to add value to society in this quickly evolving situation.

You are not alone; we are all in this together! Science is a creative force that is always adapting, as are vibrant research communities like Flux. Notably, science will continue and can help us through these times. Thus, we must persist, unite, and support our community of developmental cognitive neuroscientists in continuing their scientific endeavors. We want to encourage you to revel in the excitement of your creative studies and scientific discoveries and proceed working on your submissions to Flux as we are determined to proceed with either an in person or virtual meeting. We are also actively discussing ways to plan and adapt expectations around submissions and review (ie., studies at various levels of completion will be considered in a more flexible way).

We also want to motivate all to be a voice of encouragement and assistance to the community at large sharing our knowledge of education, the impact of adversity, and the importance of supporting optimal development during these trying times. Thus, we are working on offering a platform for exchange of ideas to discuss how we are dealing with remote science, how to inform our society given our knowledge of development, approaches for helping children at home removed from education and their peers, as well as research initiatives to understand the effects of this unfortunate natural social phenomenon on development.

Beatriz Luna
President of Flux and the Flux Board

03/16/2020

Per University directives to caution regarding the covid-19, all studies are suspended until further notice.

01/31/2020

Dr. Luna is featured on this podcast talking about adolescent brain development wrt the juvenile detention system

Brain science convinced the Supreme Court to give thousands of so-called "juvenile lifers" a shot at freedom. Stephen is one of them.

11/02/2019

LNCD Halloween 2019!

10/31/2019

Congratulations to Dr. Finn Calabro (+ friends) on an important publication which reveals new evidence supporting the link between the development of high-level cognition through adolescence and an increase in functional connectivity between the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex! This new information was derived from a combination of memory and eye-tracking tasks, behavioral assessments, and resting state brain imaging.

Abstract. Significant improvements in cognitive control occur from childhood through adolescence, supported by the maturation of prefrontal systems. However, l