Two new training papers coming out

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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 afterwards. This time, we also looked in more detail at the medium-term maintenance of training effects.
Behaviourally we replicated some of the findings from the original study. We observed immediate transfer, following training, to a variety of untrained tasks. We also found that training led to reduced salivary cortisol – although it was a slightly surprising finding as it was for average cortisol readings across the entire session and not for cortisol reactivity. So we'll definitely wait to see whether that finding replicates before taking it too seriously. We also looked at the medium-term maintenance of training effects and found that they tended to dissipate relatively rapidly – which is not surprising, but does obviously have practical, as well as theoretical implications.
The second paper, which is coming out in Child Development, was run at Tampere in Finland, with Linda Forssman as first author. In this we used a similar model, but looked at whether training non-social attention control led to transfer to infants’ attention in social contexts – specifically their likelihood of following another adults’ direction of gaze on a tabletop task. We did find some results that potentially are quite exciting: the (non-social) attention training led to increases in infants' likelihood of responding to an experimenter's social attention bid, in a tabletop setting. Again, though, it's still early days. We are running the same pre-post assessment in a couple of other, ongoing training studies - so we'll definitely get an opportunity to see whether these results replicate.
Wass, S.V., Cook, C. & Clackson, K. (2017). Changes in behaviour and salivary cortisol following targeted cognitive training in typical 12-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology. 53(5), 815-825.

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