14th Annual Flux Congress — Day One
Today was my first day at the 14th Annual Flux Congress, and if there was one theme that seemed to connect nearly every presentation, it was this: the developing brain is deeply shaped by what matters to us, who surrounds us, and what we learn to pay attention to.
The opening keynote from Ron Dahl, MD, explored adolescence as more than a transition between childhood and adulthood. He described puberty as the beginning of a particularly important period of social and relational learning—one in which the brain becomes increasingly sensitive to social feedback, evaluation, belonging, and contribution.
Drawing comparisons across highly social “fission-fusion” species, including humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, and dolphins, Dr. Dahl highlighted the developmental challenge of moving beyond dependence on close kin and learning how to function within a larger social community. Adolescence may help create the motivation to build social capital: learning how we can contribute to groups, relationships, and communities beyond ourselves.
One idea that especially stuck with me was thinking of the hypothalamus not simply as a homeostatic thermostat, but as an adaptive priority manager—helping the brain and body shift behavior according to what is most important at a given moment.
The afternoon sessions expanded this idea of development as an ongoing interaction between brain, body, attention, and environment.
Maria Laura Filippetti, PhD, discussed the development of bodily self-awareness through the integration of interoceptive signals—information coming from within the body—and exteroceptive signals coming from the outside world. Even in infancy, the developing sense of “self” appears to emerge through repeated interactions between bodily states and environmental experiences.
Dima Amso, PhD, explored what she described as the “organized chaos” of early learning. Her work examined how infants learn the statistical and social structure of their environments, including how patterns of maternal predictability relate to infant attention, behavioral synchrony, brain function, and development of regions such as the nucleus accumbens. It was a fascinating reminder that variability itself can contain information for the developing brain.
Noa Ofen, PhD, examined the relationship between perception and memory across development, particularly how specialization within medial temporal and visual brain systems contributes to our increasing ability to encode and remember complex scenes.
Then Amy Finn, PhD, presented something I found particularly interesting: children may actually be better than adults at learning information that adults have learned to ignore. As attentional systems mature, we become increasingly efficient at selecting what appears relevant—but that efficiency may come at the cost of noticing and learning from information outside our immediate focus. Apparently, becoming an adult includes getting very good at ignoring things. It reminds me of the learned irrelevance portion of learning and behavior.
Later presentations pushed developmental neuroscience beyond the laboratory.
Charles Nelson, MD, discussed the neurobiological embedding of early adversity and the importance of distinguishing between sensitive and critical periods of development. His work illustrated how experiences very early in life can become biologically embedded, influencing inflammatory processes, cognition, and brain development years later.
Elizabeth Spelke, PhD, described young children as prodigious learners, equipped both with foundational systems of “core knowledge” and an extraordinary capacity to learn from other people. Her work emphasized that learning is inherently social and that children are especially effective when information is communicated through multiple complementary forms and symbols.
Tami Katzir, PhD, shifted the conversation toward reading development and the broader systems surrounding a child. One finding that stood out was the relationship between teacher burnout and poorer student reading comprehension—a powerful example of why studying development sometimes requires looking beyond the child entirely.
Other talks examined selective attention in naturalistic educational environments and large-scale approaches to understanding brain development, including Ted Satterthwaite, MD's discussion of reproducible brain charts and major collaborative neuroimaging datasets such as ABCD.
One of my favorite parts of the day, however, happened outside the formal presentations.
During the trainee lunch, I had the opportunity to sit with three doctoral trainees—two second-year clinical psychology students and an educational psychology student nearing the end of her training. Hearing how they arrived at Flux, what shaped their research interests, and where they hoped their careers would take them was both fascinating and encouraging. Conferences can sometimes feel like a blur of slides, methods, acronyms, and brain regions, so getting to hear the human stories behind the research was refreshing.
After one day, my biggest takeaway is that developmental cognitive neuroscience increasingly seems to be asking a broader question than simply “How does the brain develop?”
It is asking:
How does a developing brain learn what matters?
From bodily sensations and caregiver interactions in infancy, to attention and memory in childhood, to social belonging and contribution during adolescence, development appears to be an ongoing process of discovering which signals deserve our attention—and learning how to use them to navigate an increasingly complex social world.
Not a bad way to start Day One.
