Amy Needham
Vanderbilt University, TN·Psychology
Keeping an impulse in check — waiting your turn, following a multi-step direction, deciding not to spend money — depends on a skill psychologists call inhibitory control. It is a relative area of difficulty for people with Down syndrome, the most common chromosomal cause of cognitive disability, affecting roughly 1 in 700 births.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Down syndrome
inhibitory control
executive function
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether drumming lessons improve inhibitory control — the ability to hold back an impulse — in 7- to 12-year-old children with Down syndrome, comparing an immediate-lesson group with a wait-list control group across two lab visits.
- Measure both behavioral and neural indicators of inhibitory control before and after the lesson period, to determine whether any behavioral gains are accompanied by changes in underlying brain function.
- Assess whether lessons increase the precision of beat perception, measured as the brain's tracking of a rhythmic pulse, and of children's own drumming performance.
- Determine whether parents report improvements in children's social behavior after drumming lessons, using a standardized social skills questionnaire administered at both visits.
More about the research
Earlier research has linked drumming, which requires locking movement to a beat, with stronger inhibitory control, raising the question of whether music lessons could be used as a practical way to build that skill.
Why it matters
Inhibitory control affects everyday independence for people with Down syndrome, from following instructions to handling money. If drumming lessons measurably improve this skill and the brain activity behind it, the results could offer empirical support for adding structured rhythm activities to the set of accessible, low-cost therapeutic options used with children with Down syndrome, and may also inform benefits for social behavior.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yingying Yang
Montclair State University, NJ·Psychology
Determine whether spatial navigation tasks such as the Hidden Goal Task separate adults with Down syndrome showing early Alzheimer's-like decline from those aging normally, comparing egocentric, allocentric and switching tasks.
Alice Carter
University of Massachusetts-Boston, MA·Psychology
Test in a randomized trial across 20 Early Intervention agencies whether training providers in Reciprocal Imitation Training (a play-based therapy) improves language and social communication in toddlers with early autism signs, compared with usual care.
Jenny Radesky
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether Problem-Solving Education for parents, help with device parental controls, or both reduce mood dysregulation and problematic media use in 300 children aged 6–10, compared with standard pediatric resources, in a 2x2 randomized trial.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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