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Northeastern researchers discovered new insights about how early childhood development unfolds, adding to a burgeoning literature focused on how caregivers shape their children — and the plasticity of the infant brain.
It’s a scientific truth many in the field of early childhood development like to parrot: children’s brains are like sponges. But getting to see a child’s sponge-like learning in action, from the perspective of a scientist, requires state-of-the-art imaging and some human subjects — young and old.
That’s exactly what Laurel Gabard-Durnam, an assistant professor of psychology and the director of Plasticity in Neurodevelopment (PINE) Lab at Northeastern, set out to do. In research published this month, she and her colleagues discovered new insights about how early childhood development takes place, adding to a burgeoning literature focused on how caregivers shape their children — and the plasticity of the infant brain.
Gabard-Durnam wanted to better understand how caregivers’ behavior during play interactions with their young children taught the youngsters about the predictable nature of the world. To do so, she and her colleagues recruited 262 caregivers with infants to take part in a two-part analysis: the first involving an observation of the caregivers playing with their infants, occurring roughly at four months of life; and the second involving a follow-up at roughly nine months.
“What we found was those earlier interactions were impacting how they were going to learn totally new information six months later,” Gabard-Durnam says.
Scientific literature focusing on early childhood development has long emphasized the importance of those day-to-day interactions between a parent, or caregiver, and child. But few studies, Gabard-Durnam says, have provided “mechanistic insight” — through statistical learning and temporal imagining — about how infants learn and “pull information about the world from their caregivers.”
“We know that caregivers matter a lot in terms of what kids learn, but this was important to see that it also matters for teaching the infant brain how to learn about the world, with new information later on,” Gabard-Durnam says. “We think this is going to be a key mechanism for serving a lot of learning and potentially a really important early intervention or support target for helping scaffold healthy and positive development for babies moving forward.”
At the PINE Lab, Gabard-Durnam studies the interaction between the environment and neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to — quite literally — change its structure in response to certain stimuli. It is the phenomenon commonly referred to as the rewiring of the brain. The lab explores how such interactions support healthy development, but also the ways in which “adverse environments or atypical neuroplasticity processes in neurodevelopmental disorders like autism impact development.”
“What we did was have a large number of people play with their babies when they were really young — somewhere between three and six months of age — and we looked at how predictable the different caregivers were during those interactions,” Gabard-Durnam says.
During the first visit, the caregivers were instructed to play with their infants as they would at home in a quiet, private space in the testing center, for about five minutes. Researchers recorded the interactions using three separate tripods: one directly facing the infant, another facing the caregiver and a third that captured a side view of the pair.
The researchers jotted down notes from the interactions — tracking everything from the caregivers’ vocalizations, movements and gestures, to the infants’ gazes and responses. To gather data on caregiver predictability, researchers measured what’s called “entropy,” a concept from organization psychology that refers to a person’s state of uncertainty, disorder or randomness.
The play interaction, Gabard-Durnam says, is something of a snapshot of “what we think is going on all the time at this stage of development” between the child and their caregiver. Those interactions, and the cues the children pick up throughout, her team hypothesized, would subsequently shape the way the children would continue to learn in later stages of life.
“What I think is really cool about this particular study is that we were looking at not just how caregivers teach kids what to learn, but how to learn,” Gabard-Durnam says.
“A lot of the time we think of this instruction as explicit, but there are a lot of the ways that caregivers can behave that can teach an infant or child about the world that we don’t always pay attention to,” she says.
A few months following the initial visit, researchers took electroencephalograms of the children while they sat on their parental figure’s lap in a “dimly lit, quiet room.” The children’s brains were monitored while they were given an auditory task designed to test their ability to learn different types of patterned information. Specifically, researchers were monitoring the degree to which the children’s brains “activated more when faced with the predictable information relative to the unpredictable information.”
Researchers played a series of musical notes that were presented to the babies in a statistically predictable order, prompting learning.
The results presented a clear case for the positive effects those caregivers — whose parenting behavior was more predictable — had on their children.
“What we saw was that the earlier predictability of the caregivers in their auditory cues had indicated how well that baby — six months later — was able to learn from this new task, and that was really exciting to us,” Gabard-Durnam says.