Dr. Edward M. Hubbard

Edward M. Hubbard, Ph.D. is Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University and is on the Editorial Board of Cognition.
 
Ed is exploring topics at the intersection of education and neuroscience, an emerging field referred to as “Educational Neuroscience” or “Brain, Mind and Behavior”. In particular, he is interested in the impact of formal schooling in the use of numerical information and basic arithmetic computation on brain circuits that are specifically involved in dealing with quantity and space information, and how the development of long-range brain connectivity between parietal and frontal regions impacts and is impacted by learning mathematics.
 
To explore these questions, he is using a host of techniques including functional neuroimaging (fMRI), anatomical imaging (MRI and DTI), and electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) methods. The longer-range goal is to be able to combine our growing understanding of brain development with educational methods to use individual differences in brain structure and function to predict and understand individual differences in learning, and conversely to be able to use changes in brain structure and function to better understand the impact of education on the brain. These methods then will provide some basis for deciding between different educational strategies, different pedagogical techniques, and by better understanding how the brain learns, the development of better teaching and remediation strategies.
 
Ed authored A real red-letter day and Neurophysiology of Synesthesia, and coauthored Variants of synesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: Evidence for implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories, Inverse retinotopy: Inferring the visual content of images from brain activation patterns, Contrast affects the strength of synesthetic colors, Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia, Interactions between numbers and space in parietal cortex, and Individual Differences among Grapheme-Color Synesthetes: Brain-Behavior Correlations. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Ed earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, his M.A. in Experimental Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 2001 with thesis advisor Professor V. S. Ramachandran, and his Ph.D. in Psychology and Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego in 2004 with thesis advisors Professor V. S. Ramachandran and Professor Geoffrey M. Boynton.
 
After completing his Ph.D. in 2004, he was a post-doctoral fellow from 2004 to 2008 with Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, where he studied parietal cortex organization for numbers and space, using fMRI and ERPs. Since 2008, he has been a post-doctoral fellow with Bruce McCandliss first at Weill Cornell Medical College and then at Vanderbilt University, where he has been translating the lessons he learned about adult brain organization to understand how numerical abilities develop in children, and how brain development interacts with education.
 
View his Academic Genealogy at Neurotree.