The first reporting period of SAPIENS was focused on implementing the training and management structure of the project as well as hiring the 15 Early Stage Researchers. After a successful kick-off meeting in Rome (Jan 2019), followed by a well-organised and executed recruitment process, all ESRs were appointed and commenced work by early 2020. Since March 2020 the progress of research has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with multiple ESR projects suffering delays and disruption. Contingency plans have been drawn and executed to mitigate the key risks. Despite these setbacks, the SAPIENS network has achieved important results, including the following:
1.We have developed dual eye-tracking task setups to study attention of the child and the parent live during interactions, which allow real-time tracking of attention allocation during naturalistic interactions of children from different age groups. Other lines of work seek to develop an EEG paradigm for studying in real time the children's brain oscillations in learning scenarios, as well as using wearable accelerometers for studying infant movement during interactions at home and tools for studying trajectories of vocal-motor development for home assessments.
2.We have developed a new coding scheme for multimodal analyses of infant-parent interactions and prepared a new protocol for a parent-mediated intervention for infants at elevated likelihood of autism, which will be tested in the latter part of the project. A protocol for novel neural and cognitive markers of elevated likelihood of autism as well as a protocol for studying neonatal fNIRS activity in response to faces have also been in development.
3. We have analysed selective neural oscillations in response to social stimuli and found new associations with likelihood of developmental disorders. We have also built a computational model of ‘face space’ that allows to search for the area of face space that maximally engages an individual infant. A behavioural version of an experiment using this space has been deployed for online data collection with young children.
4. Finally, we have been analysing dyadic measures of parent-child interactions and their use in predicting brain oscillations and ASD traits, as well as developing machine learning analyses of parent-child interactions for later use in twin studies.
Within the reporting period we have successfully conducted all planned training events, including the first training school in Utrecht on interdisciplinary perspectives on social interactions and on open science practices, followed by two subsequent training schools, which were held remotely, due to pandemic restrictions on travel. The second school (Uppsala) covered multiple research methods for studying social interactions, while the third one (Warsaw) presented methods for real-time and longitudinal modelling of social and cognitive development. Throughout this period the ESRs were encouraged to develop as independent scientists and empower to strategically plan and organise dissemination and communication of research findings and their implications to various audiences and provide opportunities for translation and commercialisation. Additionally, as part of their training, ESRs lead activities related to training schools organisation, consultations, and communication.
