Associate Professor Email: karin.brocki@psyk.uu.se Phone: +46 18 471 2117 Fax: +46 18 471 2400 Research Interests My research interest lies within the development of cognition. I am particularly interested in the development of executive function or in other words the higher order cognitive functions that are necessary for deliberate control of behavior, thought, emotion, and action (e.g., inhibition, shifting, working memory, and planning). I have studied/study these functions from a developmental perspective in typically developing children, children with diagnosed ADHD, as well as young children identified as having risk for developing ADHD and in relation to symptoms of ADHD. My research goal is to further the understanding of the development of executive functions in typical children by deconstructing this broad construct into its component and sub-component processes and to study the developmental interrelation between them. Further, my research put focus on developmental change as an important factor in the neuropsychological and behavioral manifestation of the ADHD phenomenon.

Personal Interests Spend time with my family, various outdoor activities (depending on the season), gardening.

Current Research

Right now I am involved in a longitudinal project with the aim of studying the roots of executive control in infants that will be followed into toddlerhood. Advanced eye-tracking methods give us the opportunity to test attention capacity, inhibitory control and basic working memory processes very early on in life. The main objective with this study is to examine developmental interrelations between these core executive functions. The research question is: Are more complex executive functions (i.e., working memory) developmentally building on more simple ones (i.e., attention and inhibition)?

I am also in the process of planning a research project focusing on ADHD as a developmentally relative deficit. Here I propose to further test the developmental hypothesis of ADHD (i.e., that behavioral symptoms and neuropsychological deficits will change with a child’s developmental level) by conducting both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies including children with diagnosed ADHD. The proposed project will broaden the developmental findings with regard to executive functions from my earlier research by also examining other psychological functions shown to be associated with ADHD. The age range studied will also be broadened so that the developmental change in symptoms and behavior associated with ADHD can be mapped from preschoolers to adolescents. Success in these efforts would represent an important step toward the conceptualization of ADHD as a developmentally relative disorder.

Publications

Brocki, K.C., Eninger, L., Thorell, L.B., & Bohlin, G. (2010). Interrelations Between Executive Function and Symptoms of Hyperactivity/Impulsivity and Inattention in Preschoolers: A Two Year Longitudinal Study. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. 2, 163-171.

Brocki, K.C., Clerkin, S.M., Guise, K.G., Fan, J., Fossella, J.A. (2009). Assessing the Molecular Genetics of the Development of Executive Attention in Children: Focus on Genetic Pathways Related to the Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Dopamine. Neuroscience. 164, 241-246.

Thorell L.B., Eninger L., Brocki, K.C., & Bohlin G. (2009). Childhood Executive Function Inventory (CHEXI): A promising measure for identifying young children with ADHD? Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. 20, 1-7.

Randall, K. D., Brocki, K.C., & Kerns, K. A. (2009 ). Cognitive Control in Children with ADHD-C: How efficient are they? Child Neuropsychology. 15,163-178.

Brocki, K.C., Randall, K. D., Kerns, K. A., & Bohlin, G. (2008). Working Memory in School-aged Children with ADHD-C: Are Deficits Modality Specific and are They Independent of Impaired Inhibitory Control? Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. 4, 1-11.

Brocki, K.C., Fan, J., & Fossella, J. (2008). Placing neuroanatomical models of executive function in a developmental context: Imaging and imaging-genetic strategies. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1129, 246-255.

Fossella, J., Fan, J., Lu, X., Guise, K., Wang, L., Brocki, K. C, Hof, P., Kittappa, R., & Posner, M. (2008). Provisional hypotheses for the molecular genetics of cognitive development: Imaging genetic pathways in the anterior cingulate cortex, Biological Psychology. 79, 23-29.

Brocki, K.C., Tillman, C., & Bohlin, G. (2008). CPT performance, Motor Activity, and Continuous Relations to ADHD Symptom Domains: A developmental study. European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Nyberg, L., Brocki, K.C., Tillman C.M., & Bohlin, G. (2008). The proposed interaction between working memory and inhibition. The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Brocki, K.C., Thorell, L., Nyberg, L., & Bohlin, G (2007). Early Concurrent and Longitudinal symptoms of ADHD and ODD: Relations to different types of Inhibitory Control and Working Memory. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48, 1033-1041.

Tillman, C. M., Brocki, K.C., Thorell, L., Bohlin, G (2007). Stop-Signal Inhibition in the General Population: Development, Construct Validity and Relation to ADHD Symptoms. Child Neuropsychology, 1, 1-18.

Brocki, K.C., & Bohlin, G. (2006). Developmental Change in the relations between executive functioning and ADHD-symptoms in normal school-aged children. Infant and Child Development. 15, 19-40.

Brocki, K.C., & Bohlin, G (2004). Executive Functions in Children age 6-13: A Dimensional and Developmental study, Developmental Neuropsychology, 26, 571-593.

Book Chapters

Mueller, U., Jacques, S., Brocki, K.C. & Zelazo, P.D. (2009).The Relations between Executive Function and Language in Preschool Children. InA. Winsler& C. Fernyhough (Eds.), Private Speech, Executive Functioning, and the Development of Verbal Self-Regulation.Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. ISBN-13: 9780521866071