From correlation to causation in learning and ADHD: insights from genetically informed designs
Elsje van Bergen’s research examines how genetic and environmental factors jointly shape individual differences in learning and behaviour. In this talk, she introduces key concepts, such as heritability and polygenic scores. She challenges intuitive but potentially misleading interpretations of environmental effects – for example, between home factors (like the number of books) and outcomes such as dyslexia. Her work shows that dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD frequently co-occur due to shared genetic influences rather than causal relationships. She then shows why educational skills and ADHD tend to run in families, using big data on parents and children, employing polygenic scores and pedigree data. Finally, she presents the Familial Control Method, a phenotypic approach that uses measures of parents, children, and the home environment to approximate familial confounding when genetically informative data are unavailable
Bio
Elsje van Bergen is Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Oslo, and Programme Leader of Educational Neuroscience at LEARN!. Her research lies at the intersection of genetics, psychology, education, and psychiatry, and focuses on why learning and neurodevelopmental conditions run in families. Her work has been recognised with several major grants and international awards.
This is a CEN event.