Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MOTION (Mobile Technology for Infant Social-Cognitive Neuroscience: Interdisciplinary Training Networkfor Innovative Infancy Research)
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-01-01 bis 2022-06-30
The first three years of life are critical for a child’s future development. Researchers and policy makers both stress that the first three years of children’s life have more impact on their future outcomes than any other period during their life. The time up to toddlerhood thus forms a unique window of opportunity for “getting it right”. It is therefore essential for the future prosperity and well-being of the European Union and its citizens that we have a thorough understanding of human social and cognitive development during this time window. In the past, experimental research on the social and cognitive development of young children has had to rely heavily on studying infants and toddlers within restricted, artificial laboratory contexts. However, studying development in such highly constrained situations involves the risk of producing knowledge that is only marginally relevant to the real-life phenomena one is actually interested in . In order to fully understand early development, young children need to be studied in their natural social and physical environment. Fortunately, recent advances in wearable and wireless technologies now provide us with a unique opportunity to do this: We are now able to literally “unleash” the children we study – to free them from the cables and constraints associated with the previous lab-based methods of monitoring their behaviour and brain activity. These technological advances offer the possibility of examining how infants and toddlers actively explore their natural physical and social environments of their own accord.
The MOTION ETN leveraged these new technologies to achieve a more ecologically valid and robust understanding of infants’ social and cognitive development. To this end, MOTION brought together a dynamic interdisciplinary team of senior and early stage researchers (ESRs) from academic and industry settings. They used an innovative, multi-method approach and study infants’ and toddlers’ actions, gaze direction, and brain activity as they actively explore the world around them. From this project resulted significant progress in tool development and application of novel methods with developing populations and a series of novel research findings on young children’s cognitive and social development. At the same time, a new generation of highly skilled professionals have been trained with expertise at the intersection of developmental psychology and its applications in society and cognitive neuroscience who currently continue their work in academia, industry, and government institutions.
The MOTION project has four main areas of impact: The ESRs themselves, industry, scientific breakthroughs and impact in other fields, including early education. Thanks to the comprehensive MOTION training programme, our ESR cohort became multidisciplinary experts and now continue their careers on research-related positions within academic, industry, or related policy sectors across Europe. Exchange and cooperation between the MOTION academic and industrial partners led to the development of novel research tools and helped enabling a gradual integration of research practices across sectors and across Europe. Many knowledge transfer activities have been performed for various audiences and active exchange with the field has begun which will have significant effects on the future of one of Europe’s most important research areas – the study of how young children interact with and learn from their environment. Ultimately, our actions contributed to our knowledge of how during the very first years of a child’s life the basis for a healthy, well-adapted future can be laid.