Author: sifre002

A lot of research indicates that self-regulation is important for school success, social functioning, mental health, and positive behavioral outcomes in children. Additionally, self-regulation has been associated with better outcomes for children growing up in both high risk and low risk environments. This suggests good self-regulation is what we call a promotive factor for children, meaning that it is good for children’s developmental outcomes regardless of the environment they are reared in. However, research has also shown that children growing up in high risk environments, such as extreme poverty, exhibit more dysregulated behaviors.Early experiences of adversity may impact the organization of children’s developing abilities for self-regulation, including their developing physiological systems.

Atypical physiological functioning can be indexed by measuring heart rate fluctuations in children during challenging tasks. This system is believed to underlie the development and display of important adaptive social and self-regulatory behaviors and have been related to risk factors associated with poverty (e.g. parental unemployment, low levels of education obtainment, and single parent households) and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; e.g. abuse, neglect, death of a parent, chronic illness, etc.). The Emotion Regulation and Executive Functioning study aimed to address this question by testing the associations between poverty, adverse experiences, and physiological functioning among preschool aged children. The sample included children recruited from the Institute of Child Development participant pool and children residing in an emergency homeless shelter. The results suggest that differences in physiological self-regulation are related to experiences related to poverty, but not those related to adverse experiences, such as death of a parent, exposure to community violence, or parent illness. These results imply that intervention efforts aimed at bolstering self-regulation processes important for children’s success, may need to focus efforts on mitigating exposure and impact of poverty related stressors.  

We all know that babies love people. But how do babies get so good at interacting with others, so early in life? The ability to engage with other people in real time is a foundational skill that begins in the first year of life. During this time, babies develop social abilities extraordinarily quickly. This study is interested in how the body and mind are linked in these early months to help support this progression.

More specifically, two important systems are developing very rapidly in the first year of life: infants are learning to engage with others and how to regulate their own bodies and minds. We think that these two systems might work together, especially when children are very young.

Once the study is up and running, eligible parents will be invited to the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities Campus) for a 45-minute visit to the lab with their 7-to 9-month-old infant. Parent and infant will do a short social interaction task while we measure heart-rate information and collect video data. The parent will also complete some questionnaires and receive a gift card for their participation.

By understanding how babies coordinate their bodies and minds to interact with others, we will gain a better understanding of the basic processes important for early social engagement. This new information may ultimately help scientists and clinicians promote critical social competencies early in life.

If we asked the general public about what makes the “best” type of learner, most people would describe a child who is attentive and able to concentrate for a long period of time. They may also describe children whois able to hold a lot of information in their mind and manipulate that information to critically think about and solve diverse sets of problems. These skills are typically referred to as executive functions and represents a person’s ability to exert control over their attention, behaviors, and thoughts. Much research suggests that these abilities do in fact promote children’s academic and social success, specifically in formal school settings. Developing executive functioning skills may be great for building upon what we already know, but come at the cost. Executive functioning skills may also bias children to think less creatively and not come up with a rich set of alternatives to novel problems and situations. More flexible modes of thinking may promote creativity, implicit learning (e.g. learning complex information without awareness that information has been learned), and inductive reasoning.There is some evidence that suggests that experiences of stress may reduce children’s abilities to use executive functioning skills, but increase the likelihood of using more flexible patterns of thinking.

The MoCA study that you and your children participated in aimed to test these theories by seeing if acute experimental stress (e.g. doing badly on a set of tasks), would decrease executive functioning skills and support more flexible ways of thinking and using new information. By collecting saliva, we were able to test if children were actually exhibiting a stressful response to the experiment. Those who experienced stressed showed worse performances on tests of EF and notably, those same children showed better inductive reasoning and more flexibility, compared to a control group. 

In daily life, there are constant changes in the world around you and with that, changing demands on the brain and body. The skill of self-regulation enables us to adjust to those changes, modulating internal and external responses to different circumstances. We need to repeatedly increase activation to challenging or engaging situations and then decrease activation to come back to rest afterward. Much of this is supported physiologically by changes in the autonomic nervous system (ANS), comprised of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic system can be thought of as the “fight or flight” system, revving you up to address a threat, and the parasympathetic system can be thought of as the “rest and digest” system, keeping you calm when no threats are present. The goal of the Reactivity and Recovery in the Brain and Body (R2B2) pilot study was to design a series of tasks in the lab to assess this modulatory ability in the ANS. Young adult participants (mean age = 22, N = 27)came into the lab and were presented with a series of alternating challenge and rest tasks. Four of the challenge tasks involved social evaluation (MirrorTracing, Tangrams, Maze, and Quiz), two of the challenge tasks involved cognitive effort (SST and MSIT), and rest tasks involved no element of evaluation or effort (baseline and recovery). The purpose of this task series was to test the repeated reactivity, recovery, and internal organization of sympathetic and parasympathetic system processes. So far only part of the data have been analyzed, but already we are seeing descriptive shifts in physiological systems to the different tasks. Next steps will involve statistical analysis of system dynamics and relating of those shifts to other indicators of behavioral and emotional self-regulation.

Long before your baby can crawl or walk, they are learning about their world through their eyes! What your baby pays attention to depends on many interacting – and often, competing – processes. For example, sometimes infants’ attention prioritizes things that are perceptually salient, like bright lights or shiny toys. Other times, they can inhibit their attention away from perceptually salient stimuli to other things in their environment that they may choose to look at instead.

We think that overtime, babies’ visual attention becomes more self-organized and complex. One way to characterize this complexity is through fractals. Fractals are shapes that exhibit similar patterns at increasingly small scales, and appear nearly the same at different levels (Figure 1). They’re frequently found in nature, and have been used to characterize heart rates, earthquakes and mountain-ranges. We decided to see if we could characterize infants’ eye-gaze patterns using fractals.

To do this, we showed babies (ages 3-36 months) movies of ladies dancing (Figure 2a). We also showed them versions of the movies with most of the social content removed (Figure 2b). We found that the structure of infants’ eye-gaze was, in fact, fractal! Furthermore, over the first years of life, their eye-gaze structure became increasingly fractal. Notably, infants’ eye-gaze patterns were more self-organized/fractal when they were watching the movies with social content, compared to the movies with the social content removed. This suggests that infants’ attention may be more self-organized when they are more actively engaged with a stimulus, or when a stimulus is more meaningful to them