Developing tools and expertise to include a diverse range of toddlers in developmental cognitive neuroscience research: mapping profiles of visual attention

Braithwaite, Eleanor Katie (2024) Developing tools and expertise to include a diverse range of toddlers in developmental cognitive neuroscience research: mapping profiles of visual attention. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

Given rapid brain and cognitive development during the first years of life, it is likely that experiences during this period could play a particularly significant role in development. Though research indicates a relation between socioeconomic status (SES) – relating to an individual’s social standing - and both cognitive and brain development, to date much of this research has included samples that are biased toward including children from high socioeconomic families. This limits the generalisability of findings and might cause aspects of environment-development relations to be missed. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (DCN) additionally lacks specialism to conduct research with toddlers, meaning an understanding of neurocognitive development during this period is somewhat deficient. Such that relations between experiences and development during the early years of life can be fully understood, this thesis focussed on developing tools and expertise to fill these two gaps and to build knowledge of toddler neurodevelopment. Chapter 2 investigated how SES was related to profiles of visual attention in young toddlers. A data-driven approach to investigating SES measures found two clusters which largely related to typically low and high SES groups. Given that a battery of eye-tracking tasks was found to be a feasible method for collecting visual attention information from a large sample of 18-month-olds, eye-tracking data was used to compare performance between two SES groups. This revealed that the higher SES group looked less to faces, were faster to find a hidden object in a working memory paradigm and were faster and more accurate in the learning phase of a cognitive control task than the low SES group. The study in chapter 3 utilised a two-visit design to assess the reliability of a wearable, wireless electroencephalography (EEG) system with typically developing toddlers. It focussed specifically on alpha and theta power measures during video viewing, as these are thought to be neural measures involved with cognition and learning and may be particularly involved in aspects of development which are impacted by early environmental experiences. Numerous measures of theta and alpha power were calculated, with significant differences in EEG power found between different frequency bands, brain regions, video conditions and other comparisons. Reliability for these measures varied considerably, with relative theta power over the whole head and whole video providing the most reliable measures. Chapter 4 used a paradigm designed specifically to gather good quantity and quality EEG data from toddlers, which was additionally suited to use in less-controlled settings. It found that 2- and 3-year-olds’ theta power was higher during social and exploration, compared to non-social and bubble blowing conditions, whilst alpha was lower during exploration compared to all other conditions. Relations were also found between depth (length) of exploration and each of theta and alpha in posterior regions, whilst a positive relation between experience of chaotic environments and depth of exploration may be considered in context of useful adaptations to experiences. Feasibility analyses showed high parental acceptability and suitability of this less-controlled design for gathering neurocognitive data from toddlers. Chapter 5 investigated methods for increasing the diversity of participants in developmental research, through the development of a scalable app-based measure of early development. Focus groups and questionnaire data identified factors which parents consider important for research utilising an app-based tool, which could have influential implications for future development of this research. A current app-based tool revealed strong relations between app measures, age, and other cognitive measures, supporting the validity of this tool for cognitive data collection. Finally, a data-driven approach found two clusters among numerous SES variables which mapped to a low and high SES group as is typically used in research, though analyses did not reveal a relation between SES grouping and cognitive ability. Overall, this thesis has made both theoretical and practical contributions to knowledge of neurocognitive development in toddlers and has provided expertise for improving diversity in future DCN research.

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