Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ONACSA (Oscillatory neural and autonomic correlates of social attunedness during early life: new mechanistic insights into how we learn to learn from one another)
Período documentado: 2022-03-01 hasta 2023-08-31
Early development starts in the womb. Then we are born; spend our first few months in our parents’ arms; and gradually transition towards childcare, nursery or school. Perhaps the most important transition that we go through during early life is the shift from co-regulatory control, shared between parent and infant, towards self-regulatory control, managed by the child on their own. So how can we understand and study this transition? One currently popular approach is to design lab-based experiments to measure how a child’s capacity for internally driven (endogenous) control develops over time. However, this approach has a lot of challenges. So in this project, we are trying to take a different approach. We’re trying to move away from approaches that aim to locate abstract mental functions within an individual and towards embodied approaches that study instead how an individual interrelates with the world around them. Instead of trying to measure abstract, internal constructs, we’re thinking in terms of new metaphors that reflect this interrelatedness: such as ‘children as oscillators’ or ‘children as reverberators’. So we won’t be collecting too much data using traditional experimental paradigms to measure abstract mental constructs. Instead, we’ll be collecting real-world, naturalistic data with as little experimental interference as possible – trying to collect as many different measures across different timescales as we can. This will include home recordings using wearables and free-flowing naturalistic interactions with EEG and fNIRS in the lab.
The six PhDs working on the project are all taking different approaches, running different analyses based on the same naturalistic data. In different ways, they all aim to understand how endogenous control emerges from, and is expressed through, the inter-relationship between a child and their everyday environment. We hope that these combined studies will provide a variety of important new perspectives on how endogenous control emerges from, and is expressed through, the inter-relationship between a child and their everyday environment. You can read more about the PhDs projects here: https://uelbabydev.com/project/oscillatory-neural-and-autonomic-correlates-of-social-attunedness-onacsa/
The six PhDs working on the project are all taking different approaches, running different analyses based on the same naturalistic data. In different ways, they all aim to understand how endogenous control emerges from, and is expressed through, the inter-relationship between a child and their everyday environment. We hope that these combined studies will provide a variety of important new perspectives on how endogenous control emerges from, and is expressed through, the inter-relationship between a child and their everyday environment. You can read more about the PhDs projects here: https://uelbabydev.com/project/oscillatory-neural-and-autonomic-correlates-of-social-attunedness-onacsa/
So far, we have 1) received ethical approval and designed/purchased equipment required – including the wearable devices for the home recordings, which were custom-made for this project. 2) Set up equipment, designed and piloted our paradigms, and analysed our pilot data (N=13). 3) Set up and carried out the recruitment process for both work packages.
For work package 1 (WP1), we have successfully collected the following Infant-caregiver dyads data:
• EEG data: 109 (5-month-old); 46 (10-month-old); 25 (15-month-old).
• ECG data: 111 (5-month-old); 43 (10-month-old); 27 (15-month-old).
• Frequency tagging data: 64 (5-month-old); 15 (10-month-old); 6 (15-month-old).
• Home data (wearable devices and cameras): 80 (5-month-old); 39 (10-month-old), 21 (15-month-old).
For work package 2 (WP2), we over-recruited based on our original target of N=100 dyads, reaching N=116 as the final sample who attended at least the first lab visit. Unfortunately, however, the drop-out from the longitudinal study was high and adversely affected by the fact that we repeatedly had to shut down testing due to COVID-19 lockdowns, meaning that all participants who were in the middle of the 8-week training phase of the project were lost. The final N of participants who completed all 8 visits of either the eyetracker attention training or the active control group was N=49 (24 attention training/25 control).
In addition, we have generated outputs that include seven conference presentations, seven poster presentations and the publication of 17 papers, including literature reviews, methods and results papers. Also, the PhD students have lectured undergraduate students on the new methods they have developed and the results they have gathered from the project. Media/public engagement actions have included a summer 2022 outreach party, where we celebrated the families from our local community that have taken part in our project and presented results from our findings. Furthermore, Sam Wass has featured in outlets such as the Times Educational Supplement and the Early Years Educator, talking about our research plans for the grant, as well as providing thought pieces for iNews, based on the results gathered by the grant. Full, up-to-date lists of our media and public engagement activities are covered on our lab website www.uelbabydev.com and social media channels – Twitter @uelbabydev, Instagram @uelbabydev and Facebook (search UEL Babydev).
For work package 1 (WP1), we have successfully collected the following Infant-caregiver dyads data:
• EEG data: 109 (5-month-old); 46 (10-month-old); 25 (15-month-old).
• ECG data: 111 (5-month-old); 43 (10-month-old); 27 (15-month-old).
• Frequency tagging data: 64 (5-month-old); 15 (10-month-old); 6 (15-month-old).
• Home data (wearable devices and cameras): 80 (5-month-old); 39 (10-month-old), 21 (15-month-old).
For work package 2 (WP2), we over-recruited based on our original target of N=100 dyads, reaching N=116 as the final sample who attended at least the first lab visit. Unfortunately, however, the drop-out from the longitudinal study was high and adversely affected by the fact that we repeatedly had to shut down testing due to COVID-19 lockdowns, meaning that all participants who were in the middle of the 8-week training phase of the project were lost. The final N of participants who completed all 8 visits of either the eyetracker attention training or the active control group was N=49 (24 attention training/25 control).
In addition, we have generated outputs that include seven conference presentations, seven poster presentations and the publication of 17 papers, including literature reviews, methods and results papers. Also, the PhD students have lectured undergraduate students on the new methods they have developed and the results they have gathered from the project. Media/public engagement actions have included a summer 2022 outreach party, where we celebrated the families from our local community that have taken part in our project and presented results from our findings. Furthermore, Sam Wass has featured in outlets such as the Times Educational Supplement and the Early Years Educator, talking about our research plans for the grant, as well as providing thought pieces for iNews, based on the results gathered by the grant. Full, up-to-date lists of our media and public engagement activities are covered on our lab website www.uelbabydev.com and social media channels – Twitter @uelbabydev, Instagram @uelbabydev and Facebook (search UEL Babydev).
Our project is the first project anywhere in the world to collect data looking at interpersonal neural synchrony in interacting infants and caregivers and how it changes longitudinally over time. We are also the first project anywhere in the world to take home recordings from infants and caregivers examining physiological fluctuations, microphone and camera to look at moment-by-moment co-fluctuations in behaviours and physiological changes. We anticipate a large number of novel results to emerge from this project. We have prepared, for the six PhDs working on the project, six detailed documents laying out the main hypotheses that each PhD is planning to test.