Neuro Harlow: The effect of a mother's touch on her child's developing brain

In the 1950s, the American psychologist Harry Harlow famously showed that infant rhesus monkeys would rather cling to a surrogate wire mother covered in cosy cloth, than to one that provided milk. A loving touch is more important even than food, the findings seemed to show. Around the same time, the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby documented how human children deprived of motherly contact often go on to develop psychological problems. Now this line of research has entered the neuroscience era with a study in Cerebral Cortex claiming that children with more tactile mothers tend to have more developed social brains.

Jens Brauer and his colleagues videoed 43 mum-child dyads as they sat together on a couch and played with a Playmobil Farm. The mothers knew they were being filmed but didn't know the aims of the study. There were 24 boys and 19 girls and their average age was 5.5 years. Coders then watched back the videos and counted every instance that the mothers touched their child or vice versa. Finally and within the next two weeks, the researchers scanned each child's brain while they lay as still as possible looking at a lava lamp screensaver (a brain imaging technique known as a resting-state scan).

The researchers were particularly interested in levels of resting activity in the children's brains in a network of areas known to be involved in functions such as empathy and thinking about other people's mental states – sometimes referred to as the "social brain". They found that the children who were touched more by their mother in the ten-minute play session tended to have more resting activity in the social brain, especially the right superior temporal sulcus (STS). Children who received more touch also showed more resting connectivity between different functional nodes within their social brain, such as between the STS and the inferior frontal gyrus and the left insula.

Children touched more by their mother also usually touched their mothers more, but the links between mothers' touch and the children's neural activity were still significant after factoring this out.

Previous research has found that greater resting activity in a person's social brain is linked with their social and emotional abilities, such as being able to take other people's perspective. Based on this, the researchers said "one may speculate that children with more touch more readily engage the mentalizing component of the 'social brain' and that, perhaps, their interest in others' mental states is greater than that of children with less touch."

The research has some serious limitations, most obviously – and as the researchers' acknowledged – that the results are correlational, so it's possible unknown factors are driving differences in amounts of motherly touch and in the children's brain development. For example, perhaps some mothers are more engaged on many levels, including talking to their children more. Such mothers might be more tactile, but it could be, for instance, the way they talk to their children that is responsible for the brain differences. Another major factor, not mentioned by the researchers, is potential genetic effects. The same genes driving tactile behaviour in mothers might be passed down to their children influencing their brain development. It's also worth noting that it remains to be seen if similar results would be found for levels of touch from a father or other caregiver.

These issues aside, Brauer and his colleagues ask us to consider their results in light of animal research that is able to experimentally control how much motherly touch different individual animals are exposed to. This has shown that greater maternal touch is associated with important brain changes in rats, for example in the way their brains respond to stress, and that rats raised with more touch go on to be more tactile towards their own offspring. "On the backdrop of this work then, it is not unreasonable to suspect a potential causal role of touch for human development," the researchers said.

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Brauer, J., Xiao, Y., Poulain, T., Friederici, A., & Schirmer, A. (2016). Frequency of Maternal Touch Predicts Resting Activity and Connectivity of the Developing Social Brain Cerebral Cortex, 26 (8), 3544-3552 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhw137

--further reading--
Neuro Milgram – Your brain takes less ownership of actions that you perform under coercion
Babies' anxiety levels are related to their fathers' nervousness, not their mothers'
It's thanks to Dad that girls are more cautious than boys

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Students of today are more afraid of growing up than in previous generations

In Western democracies, young adults are living with their parents for longer, spending more time in education and delaying having children. So much so that some commentators have suggested that we need a new term, such as "emerging adulthood", to describe the phase of life between late adolescence and true adulthood. Adding to this picture, a new cross-generational study in International Journal of Behavioural Development of hundreds of undergrads at two US universities finds that students today are more anxious about growing up and maturing than students from previous generations.

April Smith and her colleagues took advantage of data collected from male and female students at a northeastern private university in 1982, 1992, 2002 and 2012 when they were aged around 20, that included their answers to four statements about "fears of maturity". Specifically, the students rated their agreement with items like "I wish that I could return to the security of childhood" and disagreement with items like "I feel happy that I am not a child anymore" (the questions were part of a larger investigation into eating disorders). The researchers also had access to similar data from female students at a large public university in southeastern USA collected in 2001, 2003, 2009 and 2012.

The results from both universities revealed a clear trend – students today have more fears about maturing than students of the same age in previous generations. The researchers said this was a worrying result because fear of maturity is associated with negative outcomes including poorer psychological wellbeing.

Quite why today's students have an increased reluctance to leave their childhoods behind remains open to speculation because as the researchers put it: "empirical studies on adolescents' and young adults' fears related to the natural ageing process are almost entirely absent from the literature." Smith and her team suggest that these fears might in some ways be a realistic response to changing circumstances, including the recent global economic recession. Also contemporary students' reluctance to grow up might be related to changes to parenting styles – for instance, research from the UK shows that parents today are less willing to take risks, as revealed by the drastic reduction in the number of children permitted to walk to school on their own.

It's not clear how far we can generalise these results beyond US undergrads to non-students or young adults in other cultures. It's also worth noting that it's possible that all age groups today (not just young adults) are more anxious about ageing than were people of a similar age in previous eras. Still, as Smith and her colleagues put it, the new findings certainly suggest that "today's emerging adults seem reluctant to take on life's next chapter" and that we perhaps need to do more to remind them that "maturity's wisdom, knowledge and experience are precious, hard-won and nothing to fear."

--"I don't want to grow up, I'm a [Gen X, Y, Me] kid": Increasing maturity fears across the decades

--further reading--
Compared with earlier generations, uni students today are more motivated by money and less by learning – US study
Today's youth have inflated egos
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Even a four-year-old can tell when you're contradicting yourself (and now they won't trust you)

"Yes Victoria, eating chocolate is unhealthy, but not when I eat it" – you might wonder just how long you can get away this kind of contradictory logic with your kids. If you'd asked Jean Piaget, one of the founding fathers of child psychology, he would probably have told you that you'll be fine until they're at least eight. After all, he'd observed that children younger than this age often describe things in contradictory ways, such as saying that a candle sinks because it's round, but that a ball floats because it's round.

Recent research has largely backed up Piaget's view, but in a new study in Child Development, psychologists have shown that children's recognition of logical inconsistency starts much earlier – around four years of age – when they are exposed to it in a conversational context. This makes sense, say Sabine Doebel and her colleagues, because reasoning probably evolved as a way to evaluate what we're told by others – an especially important skill for children.

A first experiment with 74 children aged three to five involved them watching video clips of one woman asking two others a series of basic questions, like "Can you tell me about the ball you saw today?". One woman answered all the questions in a contradictory way ("Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the smallest ball ever") whereas the other woman answered the questions in a logically consistent way ("Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the softest ball ever"). Afterwards the children were asked to say which woman did not make sense.

Four-year-olds and five-year-olds, but not three-year-olds, correctly identified the women who did not make sense because they were making contradictory statements. This also affected the way the five-year-old children perceived the trustworthiness of these women. For instance, in a later part of the experiment, these children said they'd rather ask the logically consistent woman about the meaning of a new word, rather than ask the woman who'd contradicted herself.

Another experiment with more four- and five-year-olds replicated these findings in the same conversational context, but found that only the five-year-olds were unable to detect logical inconsistencies when they were attributed to books, rather than to people in conversation (to do this, the researcher presented the children with two books and, to take one example, told them that one book said someone saw a ball that was the biggest and the smallest ever, whereas the other book described someone seeing a ball that was the biggest and the softest).

Because the four-year-olds could detect logically inconsistent utterances in a conversation, but not when attributed to a book, this suggests there's something more engaging or motivating about listening to an actual conversational exchange that improves their performance. "Put another way", the researchers said, "the testimonial context may serve to prompt an epistemically vigilant stance, and as a result children may evaluate arguments and claims more carefully than they would otherwise". Alternatively, perhaps they are just extra trusting of books – this would certainly chime with earlier research.

Another aspect to this second experiment was that the children also completed tests of their memory performance and executive control (they had to remember strings of numbers or recite them backwards), and those who scored higher on these tests tended to do better at detecting logical inconsistency.

A final note – although based on their average performance four-year-olds were able to identify the women who were being contradictory, not all the children at this age were able to do so, and even among five-year-olds there was plenty of room for improvement in their performance. So if you're lucky, you might just get away a little longer with convincing your five-year-old that chocolate is bad for them but good for you, especially if you tell them that's what a book says.

--Young Children Detect and Avoid Logically Inconsistent Sources: The Importance of Communicative Context and Executive Function

--further reading--
As soon as they can read, children trust text instructions over spoken information
Three-year-olds show greater suspicion of circular arguments than adults
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Infants show a preference for toys that 'match' their gender before they know what gender is

Do boys prefer playing with trucks and balls, while girls prefer dolls, because they are socialised from an early age to play this way, or do their play habits reflect innate differences in interests between the sexes? In a world where there are major gender imbalances in participation in science, sport, politics and other areas, this is a controversial question. Evidence for very early sex differences in toy interests could arguably support the idea that the sexes are directed down different career trajectories not just because of cultural expectations or differences in opportunity, but partly because of their contrasting innate dispositions.

A new study in Infant and Child Development contributes to this area by testing the toy preferences of children aged 9 to 32 months during a free-play session at their day nursery. The results, though they come with caveats, appear to support the notion that boys and girls display gender-typed preferences before they are old enough to be aware of gender and even in the absence of their parents, who might otherwise influence them to play in a gender-stereotyped fashion.

Note, the researchers themselves do not frame their study explicitly in terms of gender politics – they observe instead that sex differences in toy preference are "of interest in relation to child care, educational practice and developmental theory".

Brenda Todd and her team tested 47 girls and 54 boys at four multicultural nurseries in London. Each child was tested by a female researcher in a quiet area away from the other children in the nursery. The child was surrounded in a semi-circle by seven toys identified in a local survey as being stereotypically male (a car, a blue teddy, a digger, a ball) or stereotypically female (a doll, a pink teddy, a cooking pot). The toys were placed in a random order within reach of the child, who was encouraged by the researcher to "play with any of the toys that you want to". For three minutes, the researcher then made notes on each five-second interval according to whether the child had deliberately held, touched or moved any of the toys.

The researchers divided the children into three age groups: 9-17 months, 18-23 months, and 24-32 months. At every age, there was a clear pattern – boys showed more interest in and played for longer with male-type toys and girls showed a similar bias for female-typed toys. In statistical terms, the effect size for these differences was large. Another finding was that the gender-typed preferences showed a different developmental trajectory for the two sexes: as the boys grew older they showed an even stronger preference for male toys, whereas girls started out with a very strong preference for female toys which diminished to a "merely strong" preference in the older age group.

Among the caveats are the fact that the children may have been influenced by the presence of their peers located elsewhere in the room – prior research has shown that children are more likely to play in gender stereotyped ways when with their peers. Also, it's of course possible that the children had already been influenced to play with particular toys by their parents or other carers. However, the researchers concluded that "the finding of sex differences in toy choice prior to the age at which a gendered identity is usually demonstrated is consistent with biological explanations of toy preference." They added that their results also support earlier research using different methods, including a study that showed infants as young as three months displayed a preference for looking at gender-typed toys that matched their own gender.

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Todd, B., Barry, J., & Thommessen, S. (2016). Preferences for ‘Gender-typed’ Toys in Boys and Girls Aged 9 to 32 Months Infant and Child Development DOI: 10.1002/icd.1986

--further reading--
At what age do girls prefer pink?
Children as young as four express liberal views about gender
Mother-toddler play-time is more interactive and educational with old-fashioned toys
What do children make of robot dogs?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Psychologists have devised a test for measuring one-year-olds' creativity

The study found that creative parents tended to have creative toddlers

A team of psychologists in England say they've developed a reliable way to measure divergent thinking in one-year-old infants. Divergent thinking is a form of creativity that involves uncovering new ideas or ways of doing things. The finding published in Child Development opens up the possibility of exploring the early factors that lead one infant to be more creative than another, and potentially intervening to help foster creativity extremely early in a child's life.

Elena Hoicka and her colleagues filmed 29 toddlers (average age of 19 months) as they played freely on their own with a specially designed box that was paired for 90 seconds at a time with one of five unusual objects, including a wire egg cup and a plastic hook.

Later, researchers watched back the videos and counted how many unique actions each child performed with each object. To be counted as a new action, the child had to do something different with the object, or perform the same action with the object but on a different part of the box. The box featured various compartments, steps, shelves, holes and strings, offering a multitude of ways to play. The greater the number of different actions that the toddlers performed with the objects and box, the higher the divergent thinking score they received.

The researchers found that there was a wide spread of scores on the test showing its ability to differentiate between children. What's more, when the same toddlers performed the test two weeks' later, they tended to achieve very similar scores second time around. In psychological jargon, this is a sign of "test/re-test reliability", which suggests the test is measuring a persistent trait of divergent thinking, rather than the influence of momentary factors such as mood or fatigue. Also, most toddler actions performed during the second test were new, so it wasn't just that higher scoring toddlers were remembering their actions from the first session.

Another aspect of the study was that the researchers asked each toddler's mother or father to complete an adult test of divergent thinking that involved completing partially drawn images in imaginative ways. The parents' creativity scores showed a moderate to high correlation with their toddlers' scores. This could be because creativity is partly inherited through genes, or it could be due to toddlers learning from their parents' creativity. Another intriguing possibility raised by the researchers is that creative toddlers may influence their parents' creativity. "It is possible," they write," that if a parent has a child who tends to explore, parents may be influenced by this and also explore more".

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Hoicka, E., Mowat, R., Kirkwood, J., Kerr, T., Carberry, M., & Bijvoet-van den Berg, S. (2016). One-Year-Olds Think Creatively, Just Like Their Parents Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12531

--further reading--
Cultivating little scientists from the age of two
The jokes that toddlers make
Pre-schoolers can tell abstract expressionist art from similar works by children and animals

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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A classic finding about newborn babies' imitation skills is probably wrong

Pick up any introductory psychology textbook and under the "developmental" chapter you're bound to find a description of "groundbreaking" research into newborn babies' imitation skills. The work, conducted in the 1970s, will typically be shown alongside black and white images of a man sticking his tongue out at a baby, and the tiny baby duly sticking out her tongue in response.

The research was revolutionary because it appeared to show that humans are born with the power to imitate – a skill crucial to learning and relationships – and it contradicted the claims of Jean Piaget, the grandfather of developmental psychology, that imitation does not emerge until babies are around nine months old.

Today it may be time to rewrite these textbooks. A new study in Current Biology, more methodologically rigorous than any previous investigation of its kind, has found no evidence to support the idea that newborn babies can imitate.

Janine Oostenbroek and her colleagues tested 106 infants four times: at one week of age, then at three weeks, six weeks, and nine weeks. Data from 64 of the infants was available at all four time points. At each test, the researcher performed a range of facial movements, actions or sounds for 60 seconds each. There were 11 of these displays in total, including tongue protrusions, mouth opening, happy face, sad face, index finger pointing and mmm and eee sounds. Each baby's behaviour during these 60-second periods was filmed and later coded according to which faces, actions or sounds, if any, he or she performed during the different researcher displays.

Whereas many previous studies have compared babies' responses to only two or a few different adult displays, this study was much more robust because the researchers checked to see if, for example, the babies were more likely to stick out their tongues when that's what the researcher was doing, as compared with when the researcher was doing any of the 10 other displays or sounds. Unlike most prior research, this new study also looked to see how any signs of imitation changed over time, at the different testing sessions. According to the researchers, this makes theirs "the most comprehensive, longitudinal study of neonatal imitation to date".

Following these more robust standards, Oostenbroek and her team found no evidence that newborn babies can reliably imitate faces, actions or sounds. For example, let's take the example of tongue protrusions. Averaged across the different testing time points, the babies were no more likely to stick out their tongue when the researcher did so, as compared with the researcher opened her mouth, pulled a happy face or pulled a sad face. In fact, across all the different displays, actions and sounds, there was no situation in which the babies consistently performed a given facial display, gesture or sound more when the researcher specifically did that same thing, than when the researcher was doing anything else.

Based on their results, the researchers said that the idea of "innate imitation modules" and other such concepts founded on the ideal of neonatal imitation "should be modified or abandoned altogether". They said the truth may be closer to what Piaget originally proposed and that imitation probably emerges from around 6 months.

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Oostenbroek, J., Suddendorf, T., Nielsen, M., Redshaw, J., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Davis, J., Clark, S., & Slaughter, V. (2016). Comprehensive Longitudinal Study Challenges the Existence of Neonatal Imitation in Humans Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.047

Top image is part of a figure that appears in Oostenbroek et al. 2016.

--further reading--
10 surprising things babies can do

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Compared with earlier generations, uni students today are more motivated by money and less by learning – US study

Between 1971 and 2014, the American Freshman Project has asked first-year students, most of them aged 18, about their reasons for going to university. Now for a paper in The Journal of Social Psychology, the psychologists Jean Twenge and Kristin Donnelly have analysed the answers of 8 million students across this period.

Among the reasons tested in the survey were: “To be able to get a better job”; “To be able to make more money”; “To learn more about things that interest me”; and “To prepare myself for graduate or professional school.”

To tie the students' answers to these questions to a validated psychological measure of motives, Twenge and Donnely asked 189 undergrads at San Diego State University to answer the same questions used in the Freshman Project and also had them complete an established research questionnaire about their aspirational motives – the Aspiration Index. This was to find out which answers on the Freshman survey tended to correlate with intrinsic (e.g. self-acceptance) and extrinsic (e.g. money-based) motives on the validated psychology questionnaire.

The researchers divided up the 8 million students who took the Freshman Project survey into three generations: Boomers (born 1944–1960), Generation X (1961–1979) and Millenials (1980–1994). The biggest change between Boomers and Millenials was that Millenials were more likely to say that they were attending university to make more money – an answer that, not surprisingly, correlates with extrinsic motives on the Aspiration Index. Another big change was that Millenials agreed less strongly that they were motivated to "learn about things that interest me" – an answer that reverse correlates with extrinsic motives.

The researchers said their findings provide support for anecdotal observations that today's students have a more "consumer mentality" than prior generations. Note, however, that the trends towards more interest in extrinsic motives began among Generation X in the 1990s; Millenials have simply continued that trajectory. Note too, that students continue to be more motivated overall by intrinsic factors than extrinsic ones, it's just that today they are more motivated by money and less by learning than in the past.

The study can't speak to why students' motives have changed, though the researchers note that income inequality and rising attendance at university have increased alongside stronger extrinsic motives. They also warn that students' increased tendency to see education as "a transactional procedure or a means to an end" could be harmful, undermining their ability to retain what they learn and increasing the temptation to cheat and plagiarise.

--Generational differences in American students’ reasons for going to college, 1971–2014: The rise of extrinsic motives
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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More time in day nursery before age two is associated with higher cognitive scores at age four

Many working parents experience guilt about sending their young children off to day nursery, especially in light of research published in the 2000s that suggested that too much early childcare is associated with later behavioural problems. However, a new study in the International Journal of Behavioural Development paints a more positive picture – the more time children spent in day nursery before the age of two (defined as group-based childcare outside the home), the better their cognitive performance when they were tested at 51 months. Based on their findings, the researchers – Jacqueline Barnes and Edward Melhuish at Birkbeck, University of London – suggest that the UK Government should consider rolling out free childcare provision at an earlier age (in the UK at present, limited free childcare doesn't begin until age three).

The findings come from 978 children and their families who were recruited between 1998 and 2001; 217 of the children received varying amounts of group-based nursery care before the age of two. The children's cognitive abilities were assessed at 18 months and 51 months.

The types and amounts of early non-parental childcare that the children received in the home (for example, time being looked after by grandparents or a childminder) were mostly unrelated to their later cognitive abilities. But group-based childcare outside of the home before the age of two was linked with superior cognitive abilities at age 51 months, especially non-verbal abilities, and the earlier in life it started, and the more of it per week, the better. This held true even after controlling for the children's cognitive abilities at 18 months, and after controlling for the influence of important demographic factors such as mothers' education. The quality of the group-based childcare didn't seem to impact this beneficial effect, although information on quality of care was only available for some of the children.

The sample included a disproportionate proportion of advantaged families, but in a sense the researchers said this adds to the interest of the results – it means the benefits of early group-based childcare are found even for children who have comfortable home environments.

It's worth highlighting that aspects of the home environment were also relevant to children's cognitive development. For example, the link between maternal responsiveness during a child's first year and the child's later cognitive abilities was stronger than the link between more early group-based childcare and later cognitive abilities. But the importance of the new finding comes from the fact that the early group-based childcare seemed to have "small but significant" beneficial effects even after taking maternal factors such as this into account. The researchers said these benefits of early nursery care "may be related to the fact that group contexts are likely to provide interactions with a wider range of people, both adults and children, and also a greater choice of activities if good quality is maintained."

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Barnes, J., & Melhuish, E. (2016). Amount and timing of group-based childcare from birth and cognitive development at 51 months: A UK study International Journal of Behavioral Development DOI: 10.1177/0165025416635756

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Fantasy-based pretend play is beneficial to children's mental abilities

To prepare our children to meet the goals of a complex world, we should pull them out of their managed world and plop them in the mermaid’s court. That’s the verdict of a randomised control trial published recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that found American pre-schoolers who engaged in fantastical pretend play showed improvements to their executive function – the suite of cognitive abilities that organises thought and actions to achieve goals.

The study involved daily 15-minute play sessions across five weeks, in which a research assistant led 39 children aged three to five through a fantastical script, such as going to the moon. After the five week period, the pretend play kids showed greater gains in their ability to memorise lists of digits (a classic test of working memory, itself a core component of executive function) as compared with 32 age-matched children in a standard play condition, who spent their sessions singing songs and passing a ball around a circle.

The pretend play group also showed a bigger improvement on an executive function attention-shift task, which involved switching from sorting blocks by colour to shape. This result squeaked through thanks to the standard-play group’s scores actually creeping down over time as the pretend group scores crept up, but note that on its own terms, the pre-to-post change in pretend group performance wasn’t itself statistically significant. On a third executive function measure – “inhibition of responses” (children had to follow a tricky instruction to label a nighttime scene as day, and a daytime scene as night) – there was no effect of the pretend play.

What might be driving the improvements to executive function that were found? Pretend play involves the adoption of certain mental scripts, such as “I’m a dragon and should flap my arms when I’m moving,” that don’t carry across to the real world, which means players have to selectively adopt and switch between these scripts and default norms of behaviour. Drawing on past evidence, lead author Rachel Thibodeau and her colleagues said they suspected that it’s the fantastical elements of pretend play that are the most liable to hothouse executive function development, as they involve managing specific, unique scripts and larger leaps from the everyday than, say, answering a toy telephone.

The researchers’ interpretation was supported in a followup analysis that coded the style of play each child displayed over the 25 sessions: children whose pretending was more fantastical did better at the working memory task. Also, greater overall engagement in the pretend play activity was associated with two outcomes: larger improvements in executive function, as well as firmer beliefs in fantastical entities like the tooth fairy.

I mentioned this was a controlled study, but have so far avoided talking about the third control group, which comprised children who didn’t enjoy any kind of play but simply continued their lessons. My reason is that comparisons between the pretend play group and no-play control group tended to be statistically non-significant. The control group’s executive function scores were in between the play groups – meaning that they actually did better than the standard play condition.

Future research might show that pretend play is better than no play at all, but the best-supported conclusion from the current study is different: that play that gives children scope to exercise their imagination is more valuable than rote, managed play experiences, such as another rousing chorus of “the wheels on the bus.” After all, during class-time at least you can grab a minute to daydream about dragons. I know I did.

_________________________________

Thibodeau, R., Gilpin, A., Brown, M., & Meyer, B. (2016). The effects of fantastical pretend-play on the development of executive functions: An intervention study Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 145, 120-138 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.001

--further reading--
How young boys build imaginary worlds together
Fantasy-prone children struggle to apply lessons from fantasy stories

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Pre-schoolers can tell abstract expressionist art from similar works by children and animals

Hans Hofmann's painting 'The Gate'
via Wikipedia. 

Abstract expressionist art in the style of, say, Hans Hofmann or Jackson Pollock, often looks as though it has been thrown at random upon the canvas. It's common to hear sceptics scoff that a child or even an animal could have produced it, the implication being that the so-called art is indistinguishable from the mess and scribblings produced by infants and animals. A new study in the Journal of Cognition and Development challenges such claims.

The researchers at Boston College in America presented children with unlabelled abstract paintings paired with superficially similar art work by children and animals (chimps, monkeys and gorillas), and found that even the youngest group aged 4 to 7 could discriminate the professional art from the decoys, albeit that this was revealed through the fact that they consistently said they preferred the paintings by children and animals and saw them as better quality.

The researchers led by Jenny Nissel see this as a positive result for abstract artists and their fans:

"Those who deride abstract expressionists’ work do so because they view such works as no better than child art: Both kinds of works are considered low in quality," the researchers write. "Children apparently have an equally low view of abstract expressionism: They see such works as lesser in quality than child and animal art. But the most important point, in our view, is that children, like adults, can tell the difference between these two classes of images. The fact that even preschoolers can make this discrimination should help to counter museum goers’ claims that a Jackson Pollock painting is no different from paintings on the preschool classroom wall."

-- Can Young Children Distinguish Abstract Expressionist Art From Superficially Similar Works by Preschoolers and Animals?
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why "reaching training" for babies might soon become a thing

Babies' first motor skills – how early they learn to reach for things and explore them – are related to their later abilities, both motor skills (such as crawling and walking) and skills in other domains, such as their vocabulary. This raises the intriguing possibility that those early motor abilities facilitate subsequent developments, triggering what psychologists call a "developmental cascade". This makes sense – for example, a baby who can already reach for and interact with things tends to attract more attention from his or her parents, which in turn is likely to foster further broad developmental progress.

A new study in Developmental Science has tested this cascade theory with a training intervention. The researchers in America recruited a group of 14 three-month-old babies and their mothers, and for two weeks, the mothers were instructed to engage their infants in ten minutes per day of active reaching training. This involved the babies wearing Velcro covered mittens and being encouraged to reach for Velcro covered toys, with the Velcro helping the babies to successfully reach for and obtain the toys. A comparison group of 11 three-month-olds and their mothers spent the same time performing a passive version of the training, without the Velcro, in which the mothers touched the toys to their infants' hands. The babies also completed a basic test of their grasping skills, before and after their training.

When the babies were 15 months old, they returned to the psychology lab and were videoed playing with a bead-maze toy (a wooden block with metal wires attached, along which beads could be pushed). A further control group of fifteen 15-month-old babies who hadn't participated in any training at three months were also videoed playing with the toy.

The babies who'd received the active reaching training at 3 months of age showed more precocious motor and attentional skills when playing with the toy, as compared with the two other groups. For example, they spent more time looking at, grasping and rotating the toy and less time being distracted. Moreover,  the babies' post-training, but not pre-training, grasping abilities at age 3 months were related to their play behaviour at 15 months, consistent with the idea that the early training had had a long-term influence.

The study involved only a small number of children, all of whom were from highly educated families, and this wasn't a true randomised controlled trial because the no-training control group were recruited later and only visited the lab once. Nonetheless, these are fascinating results that suggest infants' very early motor abilities have long-lasting knock-on effects on their later development, and that it may be possible to intervene early to assist this process. The researchers said intervening in this way might be particularly beneficial to babies born preterm and children at risk for autism, who are known to show motor delays and reduced grasping movements early in infancy.

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Libertus, K., Joh, A., & Needham, A. (2015). Motor training at 3 months affects object exploration 12 months later Developmental Science DOI: 10.1111/desc.12370

--further reading--
How babies go sole searching
10 surprising things babies can do

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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A US sociologist has accused baby psych labs of being creative with their results

A US academic who spent 16 months embedded in three American psychology baby labs reports that he observed numerous examples of researchers cutting corners and bending the rules of science. Writing in Socius, David Peterson at Northwestern University in Chicago says that doing psychology research with babies is so challenging and costly that developmental psychologists routinely do things like: checking early in a study whether their results are going to be significant (and abandoning or changing tack if they don't look promising); comparing notes with other supposedly independent judges when coding whether babies are looking at a stimulus; taking a relaxed approach to task instructions (for example, telling mothers that it doesn't really matter too much if their eyes are closed or not during a task); and making up post-hoc explanatory stories to account for surprising results, with those stories later presented as the initial impetus for the research. As an example of that last point, Peterson quotes an exchange between a grad student and her mentor: "You don't have to reconstruct your logic. You have the results now. If you can come up with an interpretation that works, that will motivate the hypothesis."

The open-access paper, presented as an ethnographic study of baby labs, comes at a time when psychology is working hard to tighten up its research practices, for example through the Center for Open Science and the introduction of registered reports in which planned hypothesis-driven methodologies are accepted for publication before their results are in. Peterson says that he "took part in nearly every aspect of laboratory life", that he took notes throughout the course of each day, and recorded all direct quotations immediately. "Ultimately I argue that developmental psychologists meet disciplinary requirements through a set of strategies that bend results toward statistical significance," he writes.

-The Baby Factory
Difficult Research Objects, Disciplinary Standards, and the Production of Statistical Significance
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Cross-cultural studies of toddler self-awareness have been using an unfair test

There's a simple and fun way to test a toddler's self-awareness. You make a red mark (or place a red sticker) on their forehead discreetly, and then you see what happens when they look in a mirror. If they have a sense of self – that is, if they recognise themselves as a distinct entity in the world – then they will see that there is a strange red mark on their face and attempt to touch it or remove it.

This is called the "mirror self-recognition test" (it's used to test self-awareness in animals too) and by age two most kids "pass" the test, at least in Western countries. Several studies have suggested that the ability to pass the test is delayed, sometimes by years, in non-Western cultures, such as rural India and Cameroon, Fiji and Peru. But now a study in Developmental Science says this may be because the mirror test is culturally biased. Using a more physical and social self-awareness test, Josephine Ross at the University of Dundee and her colleagues actually find more precocious performance in a non-Western (Zambian) group of toddlers.

The researchers tested 33 mother-child pairs in Ikelenge, Zambia (a rural culture that emphasises the important of interdependence); 31 in Dundee, Scotland (a typical Western culture that emphasises independence and autonomy); and 22 in Istanbul, Turkey (a mixed culture that emphasises both autonomy and interdependence). The children were all aged between 15 and 18 months.

The researchers first filmed the mothers and their children playing and looked for differences in their parenting style: whether it was more "distal" involving more talk and less physical contact, which is typical of Western cultures, or more "proximal", with more physical contact, which is more typical of non-Western interdependent cultures. During play, the mothers put a red sticker on their child's head. Then the children were given the mirror self-recognition test. The Scottish children showed the highest pass rate (47 per cent) followed by the Turkish children (41 per cent) and the Zambian children (15 per cent), consistent with past research.

Next, the researchers used a different test of self-awareness that actually originates in the writings of the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. The children were asked to push a toy trolley toward their mother while they were standing on a mat that was attached to the bottom of the trolley. To succeed they must realise that their body is holding down the mat and step off it to push the trolley.

Whereas the mirror test is about recognising that the self has a distinct visual identity (a concept consistent with Western notions of an independent, autonomous self), the trolley test is more about realising that the self is a physical object like other objects. There is also a more social, collaborative element to the test because it involves pushing the trolley towards another person. The researchers reasoned that children raised in a more interdependent culture would excel at the task and that's exactly what they found. Fifty per cent of the Zambian children passed the test, compared with 57 per cent of the Turkish and 23 per cent of the Scottish.

The measures of parenting style that the researchers looked at did not explain much of the cultural variance in performance, but they said that might be because they looked at the wrong things, such as eye contact and physical proximity and future research will need to explore other factors, such as mothers' attitudes towards teaching their children interdependence versus autonomy.

The Zambian children were less familiar with mirrors than the other children, but they were given the chance to explore one before the self-awareness test, and anyway, past research has shown that performance on the test is not related to mirror experience. The Zambian children were also more precocious walkers than the other children, which you might think would explain their superior performance (compared with the Scottish kids) on the trolley test, but in fact performance on the trolley test was not related to walking ability. In short, the researchers favour the idea that the cultural differences on the two tests are due to the distinct perspectives on the self that are encouraged in the different cultures, rather than to familiarity with the test equipment or simple physical skill.

"Whatever the explanation for the cultural difference," the researchers said, "this study highlights the necessity of recognising that the measurement of self-awareness is inextricably bound with the context of our development. More care needs to be taken in measuring self-awareness if valid cross-cultural comparisons are to be made."

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Ross, J., Yilmaz, M., Dale, R., Cassidy, R., Yildirim, I., & Suzanne Zeedyk, M. (2016). Cultural differences in self-recognition: the early development of autonomous and related selves? Developmental Science DOI: 10.1111/desc.12387

--further reading--
Cross-cultural reflections on the mirror self-recognition test
Study uncovers dramatic cross-cultural differences in babies' sitting ability

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Parenthood seems to have an opposite effect on how men and women perceive babies' emotions

In our part of the world, a growing proportion of fathers are rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in early child care. This has prompted increased interest from psychologists in any similarities or differences in the way that mothers and fathers interact with their children. One finding is that fathers tend to engage in more physical play, whereas mothers spend more time playing with toys and interacting socially. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology takes a fresh approach, asking whether mothers and fathers perceive babies' emotional expressions differently. The results, while tentative, suggest that parenthood may lead women to become more sensitive to babies' emotions, while men actually become less sensitive.

Christine Parsons at the University of Oxford and her colleagues asked 110 women and men to look at and rate 50 images of 10 babies expressing strongly positive and negative emotions, muted positive and negative emotions, or exhibiting a neutral expression. There were 29 mothers (average age 29), 26 fathers (average age 28), and 29 women who weren't mothers (average age 26), and 26 men who weren't fathers (average age 28). The parents all had infants aged less than 18 months. The participants rated the babies' emotions by using a vertical sliding scale from "very positive" to "very negative".

Men and women who weren't parents didn't differ in the way that they rated the babies' emotions. In contrast, among the parents, mothers tended to rate the babies' positive emotions more positively and their strongest negative emotions more negatively, compared with the fathers. Moreover, mothers tended to give more extreme ratings to the babies' emotions than women who weren't mothers, whereas fathers showed a tendency to rate the babies' emotions as less intense than men who weren't fathers.

Taken together, the researchers said this suggests that parenthood affects women's and men's perceptions of infant emotions differently: "It may be that motherhood increases women's perception of the intensity of emotion in infant faces, whereas fatherhood decreases men's perception," they said. These results are preliminary and there's a need now for longitudinal research that follows the same participants over time; the current study also doesn't speak to why this gender difference emerges after parenthood. However, the researchers speculated that "If mothers and fathers [really do] perceive the same infant emotional expressions in different ways, this may contribute to the sex differences in interaction styles that are frequently observed."

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Parsons, C., Young, K., Jegindoe Elmholdt, E., Stein, A., & Kringelbach, M. (2016). Interpreting infant emotional expressions: parenthood has differential effects on men and women The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-19 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2016.1141967

--further reading--
Men are as motivated by cute baby faces as women
How becoming a father changes your brain
10 surprising things babies can do

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Children born via IVF might be developmentally advantaged compared with their peers

Recent years have seen a huge increase in the number of children born via IVF and other fertility treatments (in 2011 in the UK, 17,041 babies were born via IVF). While this has undoubtedly brought immeasurable happiness to many families, medical experts have raised concerns that the steps involved in IVF – such as the direct implantation of embryos into the mother's uterus, and in some cases the injection of an individual sperm cell into the egg – may bypass some biological filtering processes thereby increasing the odds of inherited illnesses and disorders.

The existing research literature looking into this issue is incredibly contradictory. For example, some studies have found evidence of a higher prevalence of cognitive and social problems in children born through fertility treatments, yet other studies have found no differences between children born by IVF and their peers, while still other studies have actually documented advantages in IVF children. Part of the reason for the mixed results may be to do with the different cognitive and social measures used and changes to fertility treatment procedures over the years.

To this field comes a new paper in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. The researchers led by Edwa Friedlander at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hoped to improve upon the existing evidence base by using three gold standard measures of cognitive and social development, and by focusing on children born with the help of IVF (and the ICSI variant involving individual sperm injection).

The researchers compared 67 children born with the help of IVF and 67 children born without any medical intervention. At the time of assessment, the children in each group had an average age of four, with a range between 1 year 11 months and 7 years 6 months. Using the researcher-administered "Mullen scales of early learning" that taps motor control and language, and the researcher-administered "Autism Diagnostics Observation Schedule" which measures autistic-like behaviours and symptoms, the researchers found no differences between the two groups. Meanwhile, using the Vineland – a structured interview that involves asking parents or caregivers questions about the child's social, communication and motor skills – the researchers actually found the IVF group's scores on communication and motor skills were superior compared with their peers.

Friedlander and her colleagues concluded that infertile couples and medical professionals who work in the field of fertility treatments "can be encouraged by the current findings". However, they do add several notes of caution. For one thing, the assessments used in the current study are not sensitive enough to detect some specific signs and symptoms associated with developmental conditions, and also some potential deficits may not appear until later in childhood.

Another thing: the apparent advantage for the IVF group was only seen in the parental interviews, which of course involved a large degree of subjectivity. It's worth bearing in mind that other research has similarly documented advantages for IVF children as measured by parental report, but not through researcher-administered tests. That said, another recent study using a clinician-administered test did report motor development advantages for IVF-conceived children. There's definitely a need for more research to iron out these contradictory findings, but if the developmental advantages for IVF-conceived children do turn out to be real, this would raise some very interesting questions about why they exist – for example, might the parenting styles of IVF parents play a part?

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Friedlander, E., Mankuta, D., Yaari, M., Harel, A., Ebstein, R., & Yirmiya, N. (2015). Cognitive and social-communication abilities among young children conceived by assisted reproductive technologies European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2015.1115343

--further reading--
How women become "super-mothers" after giving birth through IVF

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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