Who is Dr. Batterink?
Dr. Batterink is currently one of the professors part of the Department of Psychology as well as the Brain and Mind Institute here at Western! Her work primarily focuses on how humans learn language, whether it be through implicit memory, explicit memory, or even memory consolidation through sleep. She studies how people pick up on patterns of language like sound, grammar or syntax. Our brains become more sensitive to common patterns, and by learning to recognize them, we become more proficient at our languages. At a younger age, the act of picking up common patterns is an implicit process, but for adults learning a language explicit memory process may also be involved. In light of studying implicit processing, Dr. Batterink’s lab has even considered how memory consolidation during sleep can aid language learning!
Dr. Batterink’s Journey!
But first, how did Dr. Batterink get to where she is today? Unfortunately, as is with most of us, she wasn't born knowing that she wanted to study how humans learn language. However, she had always liked science and initially planned to pursue a biology major during her undergraduate years. Stumbling upon an Intro to Psychology class, she garnered interest in the topic and took up a neuroscience major not knowing where it would lead her. As she approached the end of her undergrad, she ultimately chose to research implicit processing and how it contributed to memory and language. Completing her graduate studies at the University of Oregon, she decided to focus on sleep for her postdoc, leading to the combination of themes which now form the basis of her lab.
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Language Lab
One of the most important topics that Dr. Batterink’s lab studies is statistical learning which involves the unconscious ability to extract patterns or regularities from a sensory input. This is studied in her lab through the use of various neuroimaging techniques like intracranial EEG, fNIRS, fMRI, TACS, but most notably EEG, which is a fairly safe and noninvasive technique to use. By monitoring the brain’s EEG activity and how it synchronizes with patterns in real time (neural entrainment), they can actively predict how well an individual learns language patterns. If there is greater synchrony between brain activity and the language patterns seen in real time, the individual is gaining sensitivity to these language patterns, and thus learning language.
The other area of interest in Dr. Batterink’s lab is split into two parts, investigating how we learn information in our sleep and how memories can be reactivated through targeting. In order to study how we learn when we sleep, individuals are exposed to a miniature language, or asked to learn novel words. After this phase, they sleep in the lab with EEG signatures being recorded. When they wake up, they are tested on their knowledge, or how much they retained, and EEG signals are correlated with how well they consolidated the information to arrive at a conclusion. Targeted memory reactivation, on the other hand, is the pairing of information being learned with a certain cue presented by the researcher. An example of this could be the pairing of a certain smell with certain words that study participants are asked to remember. They then follow the same process of sleeping in the lab, and researchers compare relative retention of cued information versus uncued information.
How Does This Research Come About?
Often, all it takes is an idea or a topic that seems interesting to start a research project. However, Dr. Batterink also highlighted the need to keep up with current events and changes in the field. This important aspect of research involves reading papers, connecting with other researchers, and attending conferences (which are often useful for getting large amounts of information all at once).
Due to the need of answering many interesting and cutting edge questions about psychology, the field itself is becoming increasingly collaborative. Many researchers are often constrained by the research methods that they use in the lab. However, by adding other researchers into the mix, a more precise and efficient answer to a problem may be formed. An example of this within Western University is Dr. Batterink’s collaborations with Dr. Köhler’s lab (Köhler Memory Lab), and their ongoing research involving which neural processes are shared between pattern separation in episodic encoding and statistical learning.
Due to the nature of her study, Dr. Batterink’s work often recruits patients or healthy humans, which presents ethical and safety guidelines that balance the need to keep individuals safe while also maintaining the integrity of the study. Participants are, of course, asked if they want to participate, and testing arrangements often emphasize their convenience and comfort. There are also numerous policies in place to ensure that data is completely anonymous and cannot be linked back to participants.
What Are The Implications of This Research?
The outcomes of a study are often difficult to predict. There are twists and turns that plague every researcher’s projects, but often these results still lead to interesting facts that weren’t hypothesized. These deviations are often what contribute to literature in a meaningful way, and this fact is the same with Dr. Batterink’s lab. Some findings that have emerged from Dr. Batterink’s lab includes the support of sleep in aspects of language learning. More specifically, REM sleep might play a role in language learning, and a combination of REM and Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) were seen to be the most important predictors of memory consolidation.
These findings have dual implications for the importance of sleep as well as how we learn language. By connecting the importance of sleep with memory, there may be ways to decrease memory decline and help the health of individuals. Interestingly enough, this language research may aid in early identification of developmental disorders. By researching the applications of how statistical language learning might differ with children with language impairments, this provides a biomarker for people with this disorder, thus allowing us to identify them at a younger age. This research may also eventually lead to researchers finding mechanisms for these developmental disorders.
What’s It Like Being a Prof at Western?
Finishing off the interview, we asked Dr. Batterink a question about the misconceptions of being a professor/researcher in psychology, and to share some problems that she sees with the field of psychology.
She graciously shared with us that profs are actually a lotttt busier than we think. Apart from their academic roles of teaching, a lot of their time is taken up with administrative work at the lab, while also supporting their students. On top of all this, they are often active in university, student, or department committees, acting as a mentor and advisor to the school. As a mentor and educator, they also often participate in club activities, such as WPA blog posts, and even attend social events (Dinner With a Prof, Networking Night!!!!).
On the topic of university life, Dr. Batterink shared with us the growing educational crisis that has been seen in Ontario for the past couple years. A decline in university funding has led to a decrease in the quality of education for undergrad students. As class sizes increase, there are less opportunities for students to interact in meaningful ways with professors and pursue their educational/professional career. This also affects graduate students negatively, with a limit to how many applicants a lab can take. At Western alone, Dr. Batterink told us that her department was only allowed to admit half the amount of students they could otherwise accommodate in previous years (statistically it’ll be 2x as hard to make it in). Although these numbers vary across the province, or even within the schools themselves, there’s undeniably a greater strain on hopeful graduate students in attempting to enter a program of their choice.
Helpful Resources:
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Language Lab: https://www.batterinklab.com/
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