My brain made me do it

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...

My PhD work on cognitive training in infants has led to a number of follow-on projects - mainly led by other researchers at other sites. I am helping to set up a project led by Mark Johnson and Edmund Sonuga-Barke in London and Southampton with infants at risk of ADHD, as well as one led by Lonnie Zwaigenbaum in Canada with infants at risk of ASD. But finally, after lots of effort, I’ve got two papers coming out close to one another, based on other projects that I've been working on over the past few years. One, which I ran at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge with funding from the Medical Research Council, is being published in Developmental Psychology. In it we used a similar model to that in the original study: we administered a pre-post battery that assessed infants’ attention control in lots of different ways; then half of the infants received attention training, and the other half received ersatz training, and then we repeated the pre-post battery aft...

A bit on my ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship looking at stress, concentration and learning in children from low socio-economic status backgrounds. There is a lot of research at the moment into household chaos - using the CHAOS questionnaire . It turns out that asking parents to self-rate on statements such as ‘it’s like a zoo sometimes in our house’ is a strong predictor both of their children’s school readiness (e.g. their ability to sit still and concentrate in class), and of the quality of the sibling interactions and so on. But of course, this is just a correlation, and any correlation can be mediated by any number of mediating factors. Which is why we want to look at this in more detail. We are going to be measuring minute-by-minute changes in ‘chaos’ in the home environment by attaching monitors - Go-Pro cameras and microphones to children, to record how their environment changes over time. We predict, based on previous research , that children raised in low-socioe...

Following on from my post on how research findings cluster together with huge expanses of blackness in between, here is a post on one area that I think of a huge expanse of blackness. It’s a massive and (I think) really important area, where there’s virtually no research at all at the moment. I’ve been researching arousal levels in typical infants for a while now. (Arousal derived from a combination of heart rate, movement patterns and electrodermal activity - see publications here , here , here ). One of the things I noticed early on was that for heart rate, for example, if you plot a histogram of how the values for that measure are spread out across a whole testing session, your data often looks positively skewed. For example, the mode for heart rate in infants is typically c.120 BPM. The values to the left of the mode are typically quite closely clustered in, but then you get a tail, going out to the right hand side - often up to 180 BPM. I hardly thought anything of it at...

In writing a review of a paper the other day I used the word ‘interesting’ about five times in two paragraphs. Looking back on it a few hours later, I realised that in fact the paper wasn’t at all ‘interesting’, in the sense of being important, ground-breaking, or contributing to human knowledge. No, what I meant was that it was using similar methods to those that I use, but in a different way. It was interesting to me - but that wasn’t the sense that I’d used it in the review, where I’d implied that it was objectively interesting, to humanity. I was on a plane recently, and reading the local newspaper, about Kenyan politicians. If ‘interesting’ is defined as the difference in knowledge (the change between knowledge before and knowledge after) then I would have found that paper much more interesting than my normal English newspaper. Because rather than telling me about politicians that I mostly know about already, it was telling me about a set of politicians that I don’t know abo...

When giving a talk I always try to follow the rule ‘first tell them something that they know, and then tell them something that they don’t know’ (for reasons discussed here ). For this reason I always start a talk on arousal and attention by talking about Yerkes-Dodson – the thing that most people know about arousal - that it's a U-curve: There is in fact, though, surprisingly little evidence either for or against this model, as far as I can tell, in the human literature (although see here , here , here and her e). And of course, what research there is has used trial-by-trial experimental paradigms rather than naturalistic, ‘real-world’ data. So how might we address this using ‘real-world’ data? One experiment I’d love to do when I get a chance, that makes some nice predictions, is to collect a large body of ‘free-play- viewing data, using a head-mounted eyetracker. An eyetracker like this has two cameras on it – one recording the participant’s field of view (everything t...

OK so, following on from my previous post, here is my attempt to describe five types of learning that infants might be pretty good at. These are based on the distinction that I noted previously between “A high energy barrier [that] favours robust online maintenance of information and a ... low energy barrier [that] is beneficial for flexible and fast switching among representational states”. Babies, hypothetically, are bad at maintaining a high energy barrier state, but might be good at tasks requiring a low energy barrier state. For example: 1) we might present a variety of different stimuli one by one, across discrete but repeated trials. (The idea for this was actually not mine but John Duncan’s .) The different stimuli vary according to two dimensions – say shape, and colour. Each object then disappears and reappears in either the left location or the right location. Is there a pattern that predicts which object is going to appear where? In doing this we can contrast three ...