How the natural statistics of infants' real world environments shape the development of brain networks for social executive functions

Project: Research project (funded)Research

Project Details

Description

Wellcome Leap 1kD Program

Layman's description

The project will focus on assessing how the naturalistic regularities of infants’ environment and cognitive development mutually shape each other in a recurrent fashion throughout the first years of life, and support the emergence of executive function (EF). Attention is one of the cognitive functions of specific interest, since it has been proposed to be a crucial building block for EF development. We anticipate that several aspects of infants’ environments, including caregiving behaviours, opportunities to learn about people, will influence attention development and, via this pathway, significantly predict the emergence of EF and the underlying neural connectivity patterns. The features of infants’ natural statistics with high predictability value could further provide a target for scalable screening, promotion, prevention, and intervention strategies. Towards this aim, we develop tools (hardware, software) for monitoring infants’ real-world natural statistics across different cultures and socio-economical environments.

Project Objectives:

Year 1
Objective 1. Develop a platform with integrated wearable sensors for capturing the egocentric view of the infant and relevant vital signals.
Objective 2. Develop data analysis and machine learning tools.

Year 2
Objective 3. Validation of the integrated platform with HMC and body sensor at scale, in different cultures and socio-economic contexts.
Objective 4. Extraction and quantification of meaningful information for predicting EF development from the real-world recordings.
Objective 5. Analyse the mutual and dynamic relations between real-world and lab-based measures of cognitive functions relevant for predicting EF development.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/08/2131/10/23