Accomplishments of the Experience-based Brain and Biological Development Program
 

• CIFAR researcher Moshe Szyf is a pioneer in the new field of epigenetics, which studies how genes are chemically switched on and off by interactions with the environment around us. His collaboration with fellow CIFAR researcher and biologist Michael Meaney led to the discovery that a mother’s behaviour can cause lasting changes in the way her young offspring’s genes are expressed. Specifically, they found that the pups of attentive mother rats showed a lifelong alteration in the expression of the stress regulation gene in their brains, which allowed them to produce lower levels of stress hormones and cope with stress more effectively than the offspring of inattentive mothers.
• CIFAR researcher and behavioural neuroscientist Bryan Kolb discovered that the offspring of rat mothers who had been brushed daily or been given a complex living environment to explore during pregnancy benefited from enhanced brain development and a better capacity to recover from brain injury than the offspring of mothers who had enjoyed neither treatment during pregnancy. Dr. Kolb believes that the extra sensory stimulation provided to the special treatment groups encouraged the production of special growth factors by the mothers, which passed through the placenta to the unborn offspring. These growth factors lead to the production of new connections in the brain that are thought to underlie the enhanced functions.
• CIFAR researcher and cognitive development psychologist Janet Werker discovered that infants only 4 months old can recognize when a speaker switches from one language to another, just by observing visual cues. Babies from unilingual and bilingual households who watched a silent video of a person reading aloud, showed increased attention when the speaker switched from English to French, or vice versa. Only children from bilingual households still had this ability at the age of 8 months.