Caroline completed her BSc Psychology at Goldsmiths College, before moving to UCL for her PhD. She then spent seven years as a research fellow at the MRC Childhood Nutrition Research Centre at the Institute of Child Health, UCL, a research institute affiliated to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, before coming to UEL in October 2007.

Caroline’s research examines the effect of hydration on cognition in children and adults. This includes the effect of drinking water on both cognitive performance and mood.

Caroline is also interested in the effect of nutrition on neuropsychological function and the brain, in children, adolescents and young adults. This includes, for example, long-term follow-up of children born prematurely who were given different diets after birth, and the long-term effects of intrauterine growth restriction.

Her personal web page can be found here.

• Module Leader for PY2104/PY3023: Developmental Psychology
• Module Leader for PYM152 Developmental Psychology
• Tutor for part-time graduate diploma students
• Supervising student research projects

• The effect of hydration on cognition
• The effect of premature birth and nutrition on neuropsychological function and brain structure
• I am also interested in neuroimaging (structural MRI) and have ongoing collaborations at ICH.

• BSc Psychology
• Graduate Diploma in Psychology
• MSc Psychology
• PhD Programme

• PY2104/PY3023: Developmental Psychology
• PY3102: Professional Studies in Psychology
• PY3116: Advanced Developmental Psychology
• PYM152: Developmental Psychology

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

1. Edmonds, C.J. (2010). Does having a drink of water help children think? A summary of some recent findings. School Health, 6(5), 58–60.
2. Edmonds, C.J., Isaacs, E.B., Cole, T.J., Rogers, M., Lanigan, J., Singhal, A., … Lucas, A. (2010). The effect of intrauterine growth on verbal IQ scores in childhood: a study of monozygous twins. Pediatrics, 126(5), e1095-e1101. doi:10.1542/peds.2008-3684
3. Edmonds, C.J., & Jeffes, B. (2009). Does having a drink help you think? 6–7-year-old children show improvements in cognitive performance from baseline to test after having a drink of water. Appetite, 53, 469–472. 10.1016/j.appet.2009.10.002
4. Edmonds, C.J., & Burford, D. (2009). Should children drink more water? The effects of drinking water on cognition in children. Appetite, 52, 776–779. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2009.02.010
5. Fewtrell, M.S., Bishop, N.J., Edmonds, C.J., Isaacs E.B., & Lucas, A. (2009). Aluminum exposure from parenteral nutrition in preterm infants: bone health at 15-year follow-up. Pediatrics, 124, 1372–1379. doi:10.1542/peds.2009-0783
6. Edmonds, C.J., Isaacs, E.B., Visscher, P.M., Rogers, M., Lanigan, J., Singhal, A., et al. (2008). Inspection time and cognitive abilities in twins aged 7 to 17 years: development, heritability and genetic covariance. Intelligence, 36, 210–225. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2007.05.004

Invited Talks

1. Edmonds, C.J. (2010, 25 February). Nestlé Round Table on Hydration. The Wellcome Trust.
2. Edmonds, C.J. (2010, February). The effect of hydration on cognition in children. Nestlé Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland.
3. Edmonds, C.J. (2009, 11 March). Nutrition, cognition and the brain. Department of Psychology, University of Westminster.

Conference Papers

1. Edmonds, C.J., & Burford, D. (2009). Should children drink more water? The effects of drinking water on cognition in children. Paper presented at the BPS Annual Conference, Brighton.
2. Fewtrell, M.S., Bishop, N.J., Edmonds, C.J., Isaacs, E.B., & Lucas, A.L. (2009). Aluminium exposure from intravenous feeding solutions and later bone health: 15 year follow-up of a randomised trial in preterm infants. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Children’s Bone Health, Cambridge.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

1. Edmonds,C.J., & Pring, L. (2006). Generating inferences from written and spoken language: a comparison of children with visual impairment and children with sight. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 337–351. doi:10.1348/026151005X35994
2. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Chong, W.K., Lucas, A., Morley, R., & Gadian, D.G. (2004). Brain morphometry and IQ measurements in preterm children. Brain, 127, 2595–2607. doi:10.1093/brain/awh300
3. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Chong, W.K., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D.G. (2003). Cortical anomalies associated with visuospatial processing deficits. Annals of Neurology, 53, 468–773. doi:10.1002/ana.10546
4. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D.G. (2001). Calculation difficulties in children of very low birthweight: a neural correlate. Brain, 124, 1701–1707. doi:10.1093/brain/124.9.1701

Invited Talks

1. Edmonds, C.J. (2005, 1 June). The effect of birthweight on cognition in childhood: a twin study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, Institute of Child Health, UCL.
2. Edmonds, C.J. (2004, 10 July). Generating inferences from written and spoken language: a comparison of children with visual impairment and children with sight, Mary Kitzinger Trust Workshop. The Wolfson Centre.
3. Edmonds, C.J. (2001, January). Tactical strategy in iterative guessing games. Developmental Research Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL.

Conference Papers

1. Edmonds, C.J., Isaacs, E.B., Lucas, A., Chong, W.K., Morley, R., & Gadian, D.G. (2004). Structural brain anomalies associated with IQ decline in preterm children. Paper presented at the British Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Edinburgh.
2. Gadian, D.G., Edmonds, C.J., Chong, W.K., Lucas, A., Morley, R., & Isaacs, E.B. (2004). Brain morphometry and IQ measurements in preterm children. Paper presented at the 10th annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Budapest, Hungary.
3. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Chong, W.K., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D.G. (2004). A neural correlated of declining IQ in preterm children. Paper presented at the 12th meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Kyoto, Japan.
4. Edmonds, C.J., Gadian, D.G., Lucas, A., & Isaacs, E.B. (2003). Structural anomalies associated with IQ drop in children born preterm. Paper presented at the European Brain and Behaviour Society, Barcelona.
5. Edmonds, C.J. (2002). The application of neuroscience to nutrition. Paper presented at the Rank Prize Symposium on Lactation and Disease, Wordsworth Hotel, Grasmere.
6. Edmonds, C.J., Lucas, A., & Isaacs, E.B. (2002). Long term stability of IQ scores in children born preterm. Paper presented at the BPS Developmental Section Conference, University of Sussex, Brighton.
7. Gadian, D.G., Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., & Lucas, A. (2002). Visuospatial processing deficits in children of very low birthweight — a neural correlate. Paper presented at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
8. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D. (2002). A neural correlate of visuospatial processing deficits in neurologically normal preterm children. Paper presented at the Human Brain Mapping conference, Japan.
9. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D.G. (2001). Mathematical ability in children of very low birthweight: a neural correlate. Paper presented at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
10. Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Lucas, A., & Gadian, D.G. (2001). Mathematical ability in children of very low birthweight: a neural correlate. Paper presented at the Cognitive Neurosciences conference.
11. Edmonds, C.J. (1999). Children’s expectations of strategy in a competitive guessing game: what happens when the experimenter plays stupid? Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Albuquerque.
12. Edmonds, C.J. (1999). How do children respond to the unexpected? Theory of mind and executive function in a competitive game. Paper presented at the 9th European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Greece and the BPS Developmental Section Conference, Nottingham.

• Honorary Research Fellow, MRC Childhood Nutrition Research Centre, Institute of Child Health, UCL
• Member of the Institute for Research in Child Development
• Chartered Psychologist
• Associate Fellow of the BPS
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Does having a drink of water help children think? A summary of some recent findings

Edmonds, C.J.

Water is the optimal drink for both adults and children. New guidelines specify how much children should drink during the day. Children are at greater risk of dehydration than adults. While English schools must legally provide drinking water for children, they differ in how they put this legislation into practice. Some schools allow children to have drinking water on their desks, while others restrict access. There are links between the type of access and the hydration state of children. In adults, there are well established links between dehydration and negative effects on cognitive performance. Recent studies suggest that dehydrated children also perform poorly on cognitive tests. More recent research has found that giving children a drink of water improved their cognitive performance on tests of memory, attention, and visual search tasks. These positive effects on cognition are likely to underpin positive effects on academic performance and providing regular access to drinking water in schools would be a cheap and easy way to improve children’s school performance. Further research is indicated to confirm the role of hydration in improving cognition in a UK population and to explore the links to academic and behavioural outcomes.

Brain morphometry and IQ measurements in preterm children

Isaacs, E.B., Edmonds, C.J., Chong, W.K., Lucas, A., Morley, R., & Gadian, D.G.

Children born preterm provide a fruitful population for studying structure–function relationships because they often have specific functional deficits in the context of normal neurological status. We selected a group of preterm adolescents with deficits in judgment of line orientation. Despite their very low birth weight, all were neurologically normal with no consistent abnormalities on conventional magnetic resonance imaging. However, voxel-based morphometric analysis of their magnetic resonance imaging scans showed areas of decreased gray matter and increased white matter most prominently in right ventral extrastriate cortex, close to an area previously implicated in the line orientation task. We suggest that these anomalies of cortical architecture relate to impaired performance on the line orientation task.