Profile
Prof Victoria LEONG
Principal Investigator and Deputy Director
Prof Victoria Leong is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who is interested in neural synchrony between mothers and infants. She heads the Baby-LINC (Learning through Interpersonal Neural Communication) Lab at the University of Cambridge where she uses electroencephalgraphy (EEG) to study how mother-infant neural activity can become naturally synchronised during social interactions, and how this synchronisation could help babies to learn from their mothers.
She currently holds a dual appointment as an Affiliated Lecturer with the Department of Psychology in Cambridge, and Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
She received her undergraduate degree in Medical Science from the University of Cambridge in 2001. After working as a special education teacher and in special education policy in Singapore, she returned to Cambridge for a Masters in Psychology & Education and she obtained her PhD in Psychology from Cambridge in 2013. Her PhD thesis was awarded the 2014 Robert J. Glushko Prize by the Cognitive Science Society, in recognition of outstanding cross-disciplinary work (integrating neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and computational modelling).
Shortly after completing her PhD in 2013, she was awarded a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship for early-career independent research at the University of Cambridge, followed by a Parke Davis Exchange Fellowship at Harvard University in 2015. She has been awarded several research grants from the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), the British Academy and the Rosetrees Medical Trust to study language learning and neural development in infants and young children. The ESRC is funding her most recent work on mother-infant brain synchrony through its Transformative Research scheme, which recognises pioneering and potentially transformative scientific research.
Read: IQ tests can't measure it, but cognitive flexibility is key to learning and creativity
Singapore - NTU
Researchers
CLIC
Research Interest
Key Publications
Google Scholar Link
Leong, Victoria, Kausar Raheel, Jia Yi Sim, Kriti Kacker, Vasilis M Karlaftis, Chrysoula Vassiliu, Kastoori Kalaivanan, et al. 2022. ‘A New Remote Guided Method for Supervised Web-Based Cognitive Testing to Ensure High-Quality Data: Development and Usability Study’. Journal of Medical Internet Research 24 (1): e28368. https://doi.org/10.2196/28368.
Leong, V., Byrne, E., Clackson, K., Harte, N., Lam, S., & Wass, S. (2017). Speaker gaze changes information coupling between infant and adult brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 114(50), 13290-13295.
Leong, V., & Goswami, U. (2017). Auditory organization as a cause of reading backwardness. Developmental Science. doi: 10.1111/desc.12457
Wass, S., & Leong, V. (2016). Developmental Psychology: How social context influences infants’ attention. Current Biology, 26, R355–R376.
Leong, V., & Goswami, U. (2015). Acoustic-Emergent Phonology in the amplitude envelope of child-directed speech. PLoS ONE. 10(12):e0144411
Leong, V., Hamalainen, J., Soltesz, F., & Goswami, U. (2011). Rise time perception and detection of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 59–73.
Achievements
2022 Nanyang Research Award