Brain is also a Dependent Variable: Biocultural Coconstruction of Developmental Plasticity Across the Life Span

Abstract

This article reviews the emerging trend of interdisciplinary research aiming at exploring the effects of sociocultural influences on human brain functioning. Recent coconstructive views of brain development and functioning and empirical evidence of developmental plasticity at different levels are reviewed. Empirical findings that are indicative of reciprocal influences of environmental inputs, expertise, and cognitive training are highlighted. Links between age differences in neuromodulation and associative memory plasticity are illustrated as an example of cross-level interactions from molecular mechanisms to behavior. The quest to understand how individual brains get personalized through life-span development that takes place in the macro sociocultural experiential context is still at an embryonic stage. Nevertheless, studies reviewed here indicate that new conceptual and empirical opportunities for this endeavor are emerging.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Professionally I am indebted to Paul Baltes for my career development. He hired me in 1995 as a postdoc at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. During the 11 years that I was fortunate enough to work as a junior colleagues of his, he generously opened numerous possibilities to further my career, including serving as cochair of my Habilitation Committee. He made much extra effort to attend the ceremonial public Habilitation lecture in February 2006 when he had just found out about his cancer and started chemotherapy. As a mentor, on a personal level, he taught me through his own actions and examples that blessings come with responsibilities. The talents and resources one is lucky enough to be endowed with are to be applied and multiplied wisely, so as to maximize the gains and opportunities for the teams one plays in, plays with, and plays for. As a master of life-span developmental psychology, he left me with a unique benchmark of how to approach the last developmental task in life. While driving with him (he was the driver) through the calm shade of trees on the street in front of our institute just after he had found out about his grave illness, we talked about developmental tasks at different life stages, and that there is always the last developmental task of dying. Still driving, he turned around, looked at me intensively and said, “Yes, and I want to master it–the last task.” Dying was a physically and emotionally very painful process in his case, but indeed he mastered it with immense dignity as he had determined to.

I also thank Dr. Julia Delius for her helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

¹See http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/23/part_of_the_brain_determines_selfcontrol/5316 for further details.

²2 See http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040412/full/040412-3.html for further details.

³3 Beyond memory plasticity, adult cognitive training research over the past two decades has provided a foundation for our understanding of the effects of aging on cognitive plasticity in general (see Kramer & Willis, 2002, for review). For instance, there is evidence suggesting that older adults may still benefit from training to improve their reasoning ability (Saczynski, Willis, & Schaie, 2002).

⁴4 On February 10, 2005, a newspaper article on biocultural coconstructivism prepared by Ulrich Schnabel that was in part based on an interview with Paul Baltes appeared in the science section of Die Zeit (one of the main German weekly newspapers).