Hello everyone and welcome to this special recording of the Naked Scientists from the Cambridge Science Center.

We have got a brilliant panel of guests lined up for you tonight

who are experts in learning and memory in children

all the way through from babies right up till teenagers. and we're going to be putting your

questions to them both from the live audience tonight and we've had lots of questions

in through Facebook and Twitter so we're going to be pitting your questions against them and talking all about

how children learn and how their brains change as they grow up. First things first,

we need our panel to introduce themselves. So I'm Richard O'Connor and I'm at the Department of Psychology here in Cambridge and I work

with babies looking at how they learn to search for hidden objects.

Okay I'm Susan Richards and I'm a speech-to-language therapist working in the

Cambridge area. I'm also a PhD student at the Center for Neuroscience in

Education and I work with children with specific language impairment and my research is looking at some of the auditory

processing difficulties that might underpin their problems these children are having with language.

I'm Joni Holmes, I'm a senior scientist at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

I'm interested in a part of short-term memory that we call working memory.

And this enables us to hold information in mind for a very short period of time and to use that information in the course of our ongoing mental activities.

So you use your working memory for example when you're carrying out mental arithmetic.

I'm particularly interested in how working memory is related to learning and what we can do to improve working memory.

I'm Sarah Baker. I'm a lecturer in the Faculty of Education here at the University of

Cambridge and my primary focus is how young children learn about the world around them in terms of their social relationships, but also things they can do with objects around them.

And some of the work that I'm doing at the moment relates to

science and how kids engage with science.

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