My brain made me do it

In adult psychology we are quite used to the idea of self-reinforcing mood states: how processes such as rumination or attention biases  can act both as a consequence, and cause, of elevated arousal - leading to small initial fluctuations in arousal becoming amplified over time. Weirdly, though - and despite the usefulness of this idea for parents - this idea of self-reinforcing mood states hasn't made its way yet into child psychology . It's long been an aim of mine to take some of the computational processes used, for example, in modelling epilepsy (such as the image above, which is from this paper ) to look at this. I've just managed to finish off a paper  which takes a step in that direction. We recorded day-long spontaneous fluctuations in autonomic activity (heart rate, heart rate variability and actigraphy) in 12-month-old infants. We just measured, quite simply, the relationship between a child's overall level of arousal and how stable their arousal ...

The neuroimaging techniques that we currently have work best for studying brain activity when one person is on their own, looking at a computer screen. But, as I’ve argued here , this is useful for understanding some, but not all, of the ways in which we actually pay attention in the real world. In particular, current neuroimaging techniques are less well suited for helping us understand the dynamic influences of social context. This is particularly important, of course, for early development – given that infants spend the majority of their early lives interacting with caregivers. We know that, when one social partner pays attention to an object, this increases the attention that another social partner pays to that object . But how are these types of short-term, transient influences on attention substantiated in the brain? In our new paper, which is out now in PLoS Biology , we looked at this... We asked parents and the infants to engage in free, tabletop play with toys in two set...

I’m a huge fan of the work of Linda Smith and Chen Yu – but this recent article from them wound me up a little. It reports that, when a social partner pays attention to an object, this increases the attention that the other social pays to that object, too. This, Chen and Linda interpreted as suggesting that social context leads to immediate increases in sustained attention. This wound me up because sustained attention is, in the adult and child literature at least, widely considered a top-down, or executive, attention mechanism. In the infant literature the picture is much murkier (see here ), with shorter looking times in young (<8 month) infants thought to associate with better long-term outcomes, and the relationship putatively flipping some time around the 12-month age boundary (see here , and here ). But Chen and Linda didn’t mention these infant findings - they said that sustained attention is ‘generally believed to be the developmental product of increasing self-re...

Following on from the previous article about the ‘other-bodies’ problem in attention, here is a piece about the ‘other-bodies’ problem in stress. So we know – because Hans Selye defined it that way – that the stress response is, fundamentally, an adaptation response. Our stress systems respond dynamically to allow us to maintain homeostasis and allostasis in the face of a changing external environment. At the same time, I would say, most current approaches to defining stress don’t do a very good job of capturing this dynamically fluctuating nature. Just as in attention, where most researchers have characterised attention as a property of individual brains considered in isolation, so most stress research has focused on stress reactivity as a parameter of individual differences. An individual’s level of stress reactivity is (implicitly, although it’s never actually described as such) considered a static (time-invariant) feature. (I have definitely been as guilty of this as othe...

I’m just back from a driving holiday in Namibia. It’s an incredible place for huge, open landscapes and skies that make you feel as if you’re on a different planet – and, as supported by previous research , this makes it the perfect place to try to think of new takes on familiar problems... OK – so ever since William James claimed that ‘‘ everybody knows what attention is ’’ most researchers have followed him in conceptualising attention as an property of individual minds, studied in isolation. The question of what exactly attention is , and how it “ happens ” in the brain, is of course a topic of intense, and ongoing discussion ( eg , eg ). But almost all of the voices in this debate take the same implicit approach of studying the endogenous relationship between the brain activity of a particular individual and that individual’s mental state. What we don’t study is the social context of attention. We know, for example, that when one social partner attends to an object, this incr...

"Reviewer 1 raises more troubling issue: the sense that this paper emerged from ad hoc observations [...] and the consequent lack of a coherent theoretical framework to drive the hypotheses." I've just had the second set of angry rejections for a paper (the one that I blogged about here ). Just as they did at the first journal I submitted it to - and despite the fact that, the second time, I'd watered it down as much as I possibly could - the reviewers hated the fact that the initial motivation for the paper came not from the previous literature, but from an idea that had occurred to me one day while I was watching a testing session. I did start, the second time around, with a literature review that was a comprehensive as I could make it. I described how the majority of research into arousal (operationalised as levels of Autonomic Nervous System activity) has considered it in one of three different contexts. First, as a reflexive response - studying how exter...