Stable individual differences in infants’ responses to violations of intuitive physics

Interesting observations by Perez and Feigenson:

Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition, interpreting them is challenging because infants’ responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expectancy violations than others. Infants watched two unrelated physical events 6 mo apart; these events culminated in either an impossible or an expected outcome. We found that infants who exhibited the strongest looking response to an impossible event at 11 mo also exhibited the strongest response to an entirely different impossible event at 17 mo. Furthermore, violation-of-expectation responses in infancy predicted children’s explanation-based curiosity at 3 y old. In contrast, there was no longitudinal relation between infants’ responses to events with expected outcomes at 11 and 17 mo, nor any link with later curiosity; hence, infants’ responses do not merely reflect individual differences in attention but are specific to expectancy violations. Some children are better than others at detecting prediction errors—a trait that may be linked to later cognitive abilities.

Lack of mathematical education impacts brain development and future attainment

From Zacharopoulos et al.:  

 Significance

Our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education on the brain and cognitive development is currently poor but is highly relevant given differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. We show that within the same society, adolescent students who specifically lack mathematical education exhibited reduced brain inhibition levels in a key brain area involved in reasoning and cognitive learning. Importantly, these brain inhibition levels predicted mathematical attainment ∼19 mo later, suggesting they play a role in neuroplasticity. Our study provides biological understanding of the impact of the lack of mathematical education on the developing brain and the mutual play between biology and education.

Abstract

Formal education has a long-term impact on an individual’s life. However, our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education, such as in mathematics, is currently poor but is highly relevant given the extant differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. Here we examined whether neurotransmitter concentrations in the adolescent brain could classify whether a student is lacking mathematical education. Decreased γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) successfully classified whether an adolescent studies math and was negatively associated with frontoparietal connectivity. In a second experiment, we uncovered that our findings were not due to preexisting differences before a mathematical education ceased. Furthermore, we showed that MFG GABA not only classifies whether an adolescent is studying math or not, but it also predicts the changes in mathematical reasoning ∼19 mo later. The present results extend previous work in animals that has emphasized the role of GABA neurotransmission in synaptic and network plasticity and highlight the effect of a specific lack of education on MFG GABA concentration and learning-dependent plasticity. Our findings reveal the reciprocal effect between brain development and education and demonstrate the negative consequences of a specific lack of education during adolescence on brain plasticity and cognitive functions.

Storytelling increases oxytocin and positive emotions, decreases cortisol and pain, in hospitalized kids

From Brockington et al.:

Storytelling is a distinctive human characteristic that may have played a fundamental role in humans’ ability to bond and navigate challenging social settings throughout our evolution. However, the potential impact of storytelling on regulating physiological and psychological functions has received little attention. We investigated whether listening to narratives from a storyteller can provide beneficial effects for children admitted to intensive care units. Biomarkers (oxytocin and cortisol), pain scores, and psycholinguistic associations were collected immediately before and after storytelling and an active control intervention (solving riddles that also involved social interaction but lacked the immersive narrative aspect). Compared with the control group, children in the storytelling group showed a marked increase in oxytocin combined with a decrease in cortisol in saliva after the 30-min intervention. They also reported less pain and used more positive lexical markers when describing their time in hospital. Our findings provide a psychophysiological basis for the short-term benefits of storytelling and suggest that a simple and inexpensive intervention may help alleviate the physical and psychological pain of hospitalized children on the day of the intervention.

Plasticity during our development of mapping time on to space.

A previous mindblog post has pointed to work showing how culture shapes our spatial conceptions of time. Starr and Srinivasan now address the development of spatial representations of time in three dimension in children from different cultures.:

Across cultures, people frequently communicate about time in terms of space. English speakers in the United States, for example, might “look forward” to the future or gesture toward the left when talking about the past. As shown by these examples, different dimensions of space are used to represent different temporal concepts. Here, we explored how cultural factors and individual differences shape the development of two types of spatiotemporal representations in 6- to 15-year-old children: the horizontal/vertical mental timeline (in which past and future events are placed on a horizontal or vertical line that is external to the body) and the sagittal mental timeline (in which events are placed on a line that runs through the front-back axis of the body). We tested children in India because the prevalence of both horizontal and vertical calendars there provided a unique opportunity to investigate how calendar orientation and writing direction might each influence the development of the horizontal/vertical mental timeline. Our results suggest that the horizontal/vertical mental timeline and the sagittal mental timeline are constructed in parallel throughout childhood and become increasingly aligned with culturally-conventional orientations. Additionally, we show that experience with calendars may influence the orientation of children's horizontal/vertical mental timelines, and that individual differences in children's attitudes toward the past and future may influence the orientation of their sagittal mental timelines. Taken together, our results demonstrate that children are sensitive to both cultural and personal factors when building mental models of time.

All of us are racists in our early infancy.

Listening to a Sam Harris 'Making Sense' podcast interview of prolific black author John McWhorter - who describes 'The New Religion of Anti-Racism' - puts me in awe of how advanced and detailed arguments over race have become, with many brilliant people writing. This gives me pause with respect to adding any comments of my own to the cacophony. 

But...in much of the writing - on critical race theory for example - there seems to be almost exclusive emphasis on social constructionist approaches. Culture, history, politics are the main determinants. To point out that our social brains are genetically predisposed during their development to make us infant racists, performing us versus them distinctions even before one year of age, is to risk being labeled as racist, or some other flavor of politically incorrect. 

So... just to make the point again... humans are born, and their brains are wired, with a predisposition to form 'us and them' distinctions, particularly with regard to facial characteristics or skin color, that on average distinguish different ethnic or racial groups. If you enter 'faces', 'race', or 'infants' in the search box in the left column on this page, you will find hundreds of relevant posts noting research from 2006 onward. As a small sample: 

-An 'other race effect' emerges by 6 months of age, fully present at 9 months, in which infants discriminate faces within their own racial group better than within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). 

- Orphan human infants raised with exposure to only same-race faces (European or Asian) have heightened amygdala fear responses to out-group faces than those raised with exposure to same- and other-race faces. Later age of adoption is associated with greater biases to race. 

-In group favoritism and expectations are observed in 17 month old infants. 

-The facial recognition area of our brains immediately collects information about race and sex as well, showing patterns of activation that are different for black and white faces, and for female and male faces. Meaning is attached to those identifications later in visual processing.

-Deindividuation of outgroup faces occurs at the earliest stages of visual perception.

-Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons.

-Studies on people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after ranking their own race, religion, or age most favorably, people rank remaining categories in the same hierarchy, suggesting that rules of social evaluation are pervasively embedded in culture and mind.

We need to be clear that the nudging to be little racists by our genes and culture during infancy does not imply that this is what we should be (the naturalistic fallacy). It does give us a more clear understanding of how the biological deck is stacked against us as we try to modify our adult behaviors, which can never be as hard-wired as those learned much earlier. 

Genes and environments, development and time

 A special section of the Sept. 22 issue of PNAS offers a series of free online artices on biological embedding across timescales.  Here is the abstract of the introductory article by Boyce et al.:

A now substantial body of science implicates a dynamic interplay between genetic and environmental variation in the development of individual differences in behavior and health. Such outcomes are affected by molecular, often epigenetic, processes involving gene–environment (G–E) interplay that can influence gene expression. Early environments with exposures to poverty, chronic adversities, and acutely stressful events have been linked to maladaptive development and compromised health and behavior. Genetic differences can impart either enhanced or blunted susceptibility to the effects of such pathogenic environments. However, largely missing from present discourse regarding G–E interplay is the role of time, a “third factor” guiding the emergence of complex developmental endpoints across different scales of time. Trajectories of development increasingly appear best accounted for by a complex, dynamic interchange among the highly linked elements of genes, contexts, and time at multiple scales, including neurobiological (minutes to milliseconds), genomic (hours to minutes), developmental (years and months), and evolutionary (centuries and millennia) time. This special issue of PNAS thus explores time and timing among G–E transactions: The importance of timing and timescales in plasticity and critical periods of brain development; epigenetics and the molecular underpinnings of biologically embedded experience; the encoding of experience across time and biological levels of organization; and gene-regulatory networks in behavior and development and their linkages to neuronal networks. Taken together, the collection of papers offers perspectives on how G–E interplay operates contingently within and against a backdrop of time and timescales.

"Us" versus "Them" in 17 month old infants.

Jin and Baillargeon make observations that suggest an early origin of the 'us and them' perspective being taken to extremes in our current polarized political climate:

Significance

We examined whether one mechanism contributing to ingroup favoritism might be an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments, 17-mo-old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adult needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when the two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus already possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support, and this finding sheds light on one of the mechanisms underlying ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

Abstract

One pervasive facet of human interactions is the tendency to favor ingroups over outgroups. Remarkably, this tendency has been observed even when individuals are assigned to minimal groups based on arbitrary markers. Why is mere categorization into a minimal group sufficient to elicit some degree of ingroup favoritism? We consider several accounts that have been proposed in answer to this question and then test one particular account, which holds that ingroup favoritism reflects in part an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments with 17-mo-old infants, unfamiliar women were first identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one woman needed instrumental assistance to achieve her goal, and another woman either provided the necessary assistance (help event) or chose not to do so (ignore event). When the two women belonged to the same group, infants looked significantly longer if shown the ignore as opposed to the help event; when the two women belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups, however, infants looked equally at the two events. Together, these results indicate that infants view helping as expected among individuals from the same group, but as optional otherwise. As such, the results demonstrate that from an early age, an abstract expectation of ingroup support contributes to ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

The Neurobiology of Social Distance

Bzdok and Dunbar (open source) do a definitive review of evidence that psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationship is crucial for survival. Dunbar is well known for his demonstration of the correlation between the size of social groups and the brain size of their members, which places the natural size of groups of humans at ~150 (roughly the size of human hunter gatherer groups whose isolation has permitted them to survive into the modern era. The number of friends and family relationships we can manage at any given time is limited by our cognitive constraints to ~150). Their summary:

From babies to the elderly, psychosocial embedding in interpersonal relationships is crucial for survival.

Insufficient social stimulation affects reasoning and memory performance, hormone homeostasis, brain grey/white matter connectivity and function, as well as resilience to physical and mental disease.

Feelings of loneliness can spread through a social network, causing negatively skewed social perception, escalating morbidity and mortality, and, in older people, precipitating the onset of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease).

Nearest neighbors shape educational attainment regardless of class origin.

From Hedefalk and Dribe:

Significance

Much neighborhood research has focused on contemporary and segregated cities in the United States, but less on small and more homogenous cities. Additionally, neighborhood conditions are often estimated using administrative borders, which bias results. We adopt a long-term perspective on the importance of childhood neighbors, using more realistic methods of neighborhood conditions. We estimate individual neighborhoods at the address level, using geocoded longitudinal microdata (1939 to 2015) for a medium-sized Swedish town. We show that even when growing up in an economically relatively equal population, when higher education expanded greatly, the social class of the nearest childhood neighbors was important for educational achievements, regardless of social class and schools. Associations are strongest for boys, but with similar patterns across genders.

Abstract

We study the association between sociospatial neighborhood conditions throughout childhood and educational attainment in adulthood. Using unique longitudinal microdata for a medium-sized Swedish town, we geocode its population at the address level, 1939 to 1967, and link individuals to national registers, 1968 to 2015. Thus, we adopt a long-term perspective on the importance of nearby neighbors during a period when higher education expanded. Applying a method for estimating individual neighborhoods at the address level, we analyze the association between the geographically weighted social class of the nearest 6 to 100 childhood neighbors (ages 2 to 17), and the likelihood of obtaining a university degree by age 40, controlling for both family social class and school districts. We show that even when growing up in a town with relatively low economic inequality, the social class of the nearest same-age neighbors in childhood was associated with educational attainment, and that the associations were similar regardless of class origin. Growing up in low-class neighborhoods lowered educational attainment; growing up in high-class neighborhoods increased attainment. Social class and neighborhoods reinforced each other, implying that high-class children clustered with each other had much higher odds of obtaining a university degree than low-class children from low-class neighborhoods. Thus, even if all groups benefited from the great expansion of free higher education in Sweden (1960s to 1970s), the large inequalities between the classes and neighborhoods remained unchanged throughout the period. These findings show the importance of an advantageous background, both regarding the immediate family and the networks of nearby people of the same age.

The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

Having lectured in university classrooms for about 40 years, but not since 2005, I am blown away by changes in the academy that technology has wrought since then. In an Atlantic article, Michael D. Smith, Professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, describes how colleges, like the entertainment industry, will need to embrace digital services in order to survive. I pass on a few clips, and suggest you read the whole article.

Universities have long been remarkably stable institutions — so stable that in 2001, by one account, they comprised an astonishing 70 of the 85 institutions in the West that have endured in recognizable form since the 1520s...That stability has ... bred overconfidence, overpricing, and an overreliance on business models tailored to a physical world. Like ... entertainment executives did, many of us in higher education dismiss the threats that digital technologies pose to the way we work. We diminish online-learning and credentialing platforms such as Khan Academy, Kaggle, and edX as poor substitutes for the “real thing.” We can’t imagine that “our” students would ever want to take a DIY approach to their education instead of paying us for the privilege of learning in our hallowed halls. We can’t imagine “our” employers hiring someone who doesn’t have one of our respected degrees.

But we’re going to have to start thinking differently.

...this past semester, the coronavirus pandemic transformed distance learning from a quaint side product that few elite schools took seriously to a central part of our degree-granting programs. Arguments for the inherent superiority of the residential college experience will be less convincing now that we’ve conferred the same credentials—and charged the same tuition—for education delivered remotely.

Do students think their pricey degrees [from prestigious private universities] are worth the cost when delivered remotely?

The Wall Street Journal asked that question in April, and one student responded with this zinger: “Would you pay $75,000 for front-row seats to a Beyoncé concert and be satisfied with a livestream instead?”

...the core mission of higher education...in my view...is simple: As educators, we strive to create opportunities for as many students as possible to discover and develop their talents, and to use those talents to make a difference in the world.

By that measure, our current model falls short. Elite colleges talk about helping our students flourish in society, but our tuition prices leave many of them drowning in debt—or unable to enroll in the first place. We talk about creating opportunities for students, but we measure our success based on selectivity, which is little more than a celebration of the number of students we exclude from the elite-campus experience. We talk about preparing students for careers after graduation, but a 2014 Gallup survey found that only 11 percent of business leaders believed “college graduates have the skills and competencies that their workplaces need.” We talk about creating diverse campuses, but, as recent admissions scandals have made painfully clear, our admissions processes overwhelmingly favor the privileged few.

What if new technologies could allow us to understand the varied backgrounds, goals, and learning styles of our students—and provide educational material customized to their unique needs? What if we could deliver education to students via on-demand platforms that allowed them to study whenever, wherever, and whatever they desired, instead of requiring them to conform to the “broadcast” schedule of today’s education model? What if the economies of scale available from digital delivery allowed us to radically lower the price of our educational resources, creating opportunities for learners we previously excluded from our finely manicured quads? Might we discover, as the entertainment industry has, a wealth of talented individuals with valuable contributions to make who just didn’t fit into the rigid constraints of our old model?

I believe we will, but that doesn’t mean the residential university will go away. Indeed, these changes may allow universities to jettison “anti-intellectual” professional-degree programs in favor of a renewed focus on a classical liberal-arts education. But as this happens, we might discover that the market for students interested in spending four years and thousands of dollars on a broad foundation in the humanities is smaller than we believe—certainly not large enough to support the 5,000 or so college campuses in the United States today. Soon, residential colleges may experience a decline similar to that of live theaters after the advent of movies and broadcast television. Broadway and local playhouses still exist, but they are now considered exclusive and expensive forms of entertainment, nowhere near the cultural force they once were.

But remember, just because new technology changed the way entertainment was delivered doesn’t mean it impeded the industry’s underlying mission. Instead of destroying TV, movies, and books, new technologies have produced an explosion in creative output, delivered through the convenience, personalization, and interactivity of Kindle libraries, Netflix recommendations, and Spotify playlists. Despite—or maybe because of—the digital disruption we’ve recently lived through, we’re now enjoying a golden age of entertainment.

Whether we like it or not, big changes are coming to higher education. Instead of dismissing them or denying that they’re happening, let’s embrace them and see where they can take us. We have a chance today to reimagine an old model that has fallen far behind the times. If we do it right, we might even usher in a new golden age of education.

An explanation for human synesthesia

Fascinating work from Maurer et al.:

Synesthesia is a neurologic trait in which specific inducers, such as sounds, automatically elicit additional idiosyncratic percepts, such as color (thus “colored hearing”). One explanation for this trait—and the one tested here—is that synesthesia results from unusually weak pruning of cortical synaptic hyperconnectivity during early perceptual development. We tested the prediction from this hypothesis that synesthetes would be superior at making discriminations from nonnative categories that are normally weakened by experience-dependent pruning during a critical period early in development—namely, discrimination among nonnative phonemes (Hindi retroflex /d̪a/ and dental /ɖa/), among chimpanzee faces, and among inverted human faces. Like the superiority of 6-mo-old infants over older infants, the synesthetic groups were significantly better than control groups at making all the nonnative discriminations across five samples and three testing sites. The consistent superiority of the synesthetic groups in making discriminations that are normally eliminated during infancy suggests that residual cortical connectivity in synesthesia supports changes in perception that extend beyond the specific synesthetic percepts, consistent with the incomplete pruning hypothesis.

Rules for identifying your life's work.

During this time of virtual or postponed college graduations, Arthur Brooks does a relevant installment in his bi-weekly series for Atlantic Magazine. I'm going to pass on just sentence or two of each of his rules for graduates in finding your calling, and suggest you read the whole article:  

Rule 1. The work has to be the reward.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in their careers is to treat work primarily as a means to an end. Whether that end is money, power, or prestige, this instrumentalization of work leads to unhappiness.

Rule 2. An interesting career is better than a fun career.

Interest is considered by many neuroscientists to be a positive primary emotion, processed in the limbic system of the brain. Something that truly interests you is intensely pleasurable; it also must have meaning in order to hold your interest. Thus, “Is this work deeply interesting to me?” is a helpful litmus test of [for] a job.

Rule 3. A career doesn’t have to be a straight line.

Scholars at the University of Southern California have studied career patterns and come up with four broad categories. The first are linear careers, which climb steadily upward, with everything building on everything else...There are three others. Steady-state careers involve staying at one job and growing in expertise. Transitory careers are ones in which people jump from job to job or even field to field, looking for new challenges. Spiral careers, the last category, are more like a series of mini careers—people spend many years developing in a profession, then shift fields seeking not just for novelty, but for work that builds on the skills of their previous mini careers.

Rule 4. Beware of unhealthy passions.

This rule refines Rule 3. Yes, look for something in which you are intensely interested. But go further and ask, “Is my interest obsessive, or harmonious? Does this job or career bring out the best in me? Does it make me a happier, better person, or, in pursuing it, am I neglecting other important things life has to offer?”

Arthur Brooks on "The Hero's Journey" and retirement

In the most recent installment of Arthur Brooks’ biweekly column in The Atlantic, which I suggest that you read, he talks about the classical hero's journey in literature, described by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell as a lens through which many people see their lives:

It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return...The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script...Joseph Campbell...notes that...“The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.” In other words, the end of the true hero’s journey is coming home and finding a battle to be waged not with an external enemy, but with one’s own demons...your skills will decline, and life’s problems will intrude. If you try to hang on to glory, or lash out when it fades, it will squander your victories and mark an unhappy end to your journey.

Plan to spend the last part of your life serving others, loving your family and friends, and being a good example to those still in the first three stages of their own hero’s journey. Happiness in retirement depends on your choice of narrative.

Infant behavioral inhibition predicts personality and social outcomes three decades later

From Tang et al.:

Significance

Children show different temperamental styles early in development. Whether temperament predicts who children become as adults and how early we can predict these outcomes have been long-standing questions of interest to the scientific and public community. The current study used rigorous methods to characterize an inhibited temperament by 14 mo of age in a cohort of infants and followed them for three decades. We provide the strongest and earliest evidence showing that infants with an inhibited temperament at 14 mo became introverted adults, with poorer functioning in some social and mental health domains. Also, brain activity underlying cognitive control in adolescence was associated with adult mental health. These findings highlight the lasting influence of early temperament on social-emotional development.

Abstract

Does infant temperament predict adult personality and life-course patterns? To date, there is scant evidence examining relations between child temperament and adult outcomes, and extant research has relied on limited methods for measuring temperament such as maternal report. This prospective longitudinal study followed a cohort of infants (n = 165) for three decades to examine whether infant behavioral inhibition, a temperament characterized by cautious and fearful behaviors to unfamiliar situations, shapes long-term personality, social relationships, vocational/education, and mental health outcomes in adulthood. At age 14 mo, behavioral inhibition was assessed using an observation paradigm. In adolescence (15 y; n = 115), error monitoring event-related potentials were measured in a flanker task. In adulthood (26 y; n = 109), personality, psychopathology, and sociodemographics were self-reported using questionnaires. We found that infants with higher levels of behavioral inhibition at 14 mo grew up to become more reserved and introverted adults (β = 0.34) with lower social functioning with friends and family (β = −0.23) at age 26. Infant behavioral inhibition was also a specific risk factor for adult internalizing (i.e., anxiety and depression, β = 0.20) psychopathology, rather than a transdiagnostic risk for general and externalizing psychopathology. We identified a neurophysiologic mechanism underlying risk and resilience for later psychopathology. Heightened error monitoring in adolescence moderated higher levels of adult internalizing psychopathology among behaviorally inhibited individuals. These findings suggest meaningful continuity between infant temperament and the development of adult personality. They provide the earliest evidence suggesting that the foundation of long-term well-being is rooted in individual differences in temperament observed in infancy.

Why are teenagers so unpredictable and impulsive? - brain changes during adolescence

Why do teenagers frequently behave so unpredictably and impulsively? Perhaps because their brains are undergoing disruptive changes in connectivity between cortical and subcortical areas that collaborate to regulate more advanced behaviors such as such as socializing, mentalizing, and executive skills. From Váša et al.:  

Significance

How does the human brain change during adolescence? We found 2 distinct modes of change in functional connectivity between brain regions, “conservative” and “disruptive,” measured using functional MRI (fMRI) in healthy young people (14 to 26 y old). Conservative regions, often specialized for basic sensory and motor functions, were strongly connected at age 14 before strengthening more by age 26, whereas disruptive regions that were activated by complex tasks comprised both connections that were weak at age 14 but strengthened by age 26 and connections that were strong at age 14 but weakened by age 26. Disruptive maturation of fMRI connectivity between cortex and subcortex could represent metabolically costly remodeling that underpins development of adult faculties.

Abstract

Adolescent changes in human brain function are not entirely understood. Here, we used multiecho functional MRI (fMRI) to measure developmental change in functional connectivity (FC) of resting-state oscillations between pairs of 330 cortical regions and 16 subcortical regions in 298 healthy adolescents scanned 520 times. Participants were aged 14 to 26 y and were scanned on 1 to 3 occasions at least 6 mo apart. We found 2 distinct modes of age-related change in FC: “conservative” and “disruptive.” Conservative development was characteristic of primary cortex, which was strongly connected at 14 y and became even more connected in the period from 14 to 26 y. Disruptive development was characteristic of association cortex and subcortical regions, where connectivity was remodeled: connections that were weak at 14 y became stronger during adolescence, and connections that were strong at 14 y became weaker. These modes of development were quantified using the maturational index (MI), estimated as Spearman’s correlation between edgewise baseline FC (at 14 y, FC₁₄ ) and adolescent change in FC (ΔFC₁₄₋₂₆), at each region. Disruptive systems (with negative MI) were activated by social cognition and autobiographical memory tasks in prior fMRI data and significantly colocated with prior maps of aerobic glycolysis (AG), AG-related gene expression, postnatal cortical surface expansion, and adolescent shrinkage of cortical thickness. The presence of these 2 modes of development was robust to numerous sensitivity analyses. We conclude that human brain organization is disrupted during adolescence by remodeling of FC between association cortical and subcortical areas.

Childhood deprivation alters adult brains despite subsequent environmental enrichment.

A sobering study from Mackes et al:  

Significance

Millions of children worldwide live in nonfamilial institutions. We studied impact on adult brain structure of a particularly severe but time-limited form of institutional deprivation in early life experienced by children who were subsequently adopted into nurturing families. Institutional deprivation was associated with lower total brain volume in a dose-dependent way. Regionally specific effects were seen in medial prefrontal, inferior frontal, and inferior temporal areas. Deprivation-related alterations in total brain volume were associated with lower intelligence quotient and more attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms; alterations in temporal volume seemed compensatory, as they were associated with fewer attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. We provide evidence that early childhood deprivation is related to alterations in adult brain structure, despite environmental enrichment in intervening years.

Abstract

Early childhood deprivation is associated with higher rates of neurodevelopmental and mental disorders in adulthood. The impact of childhood deprivation on the adult brain and the extent to which structural changes underpin these effects are currently unknown. To investigate these questions, we utilized MRI data collected from young adults who were exposed to severe deprivation in early childhood in the Romanian orphanages of the Ceaușescu era and then, subsequently adopted by UK families; 67 Romanian adoptees (with between 3 and 41 mo of deprivation) were compared with 21 nondeprived UK adoptees. Romanian adoptees had substantially smaller total brain volumes (TBVs) than nondeprived adoptees (8.6% reduction), and TBV was strongly negatively associated with deprivation duration. This effect persisted after covarying for potential environmental and genetic confounds. In whole-brain analyses, deprived adoptees showed lower right inferior frontal surface area and volume but greater right inferior temporal lobe thickness, surface area, and volume than the nondeprived adoptees. Right medial prefrontal volume and surface area were positively associated with deprivation duration. No deprivation-related effects were observed in limbic regions. Global reductions in TBV statistically mediated the observed relationship between institutionalization and both lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and higher levels of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. The deprivation-related increase in right inferior temporal volume seemed to be compensatory, as it was associated with lower levels of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. We provide compelling evidence that time-limited severe deprivation in the first years of life is related to alterations in adult brain structure, despite extended enrichment in adoptive homes in the intervening years.

A "Department of the Attention Economy"

Popping up on my daily input stream (in this case the Google News aggregator - which knows more that I do about what I might like to see) is a CNN business perspective titled "Andrew Yang: As president, I will establish a Department of the Attention Economy." It is an idea that I wish some of the more likely democratic nominees would take up.

The article immediately caught my attention, because faced with the immense array of input text and video streams competing for my attention I feel, as I suspect many MindBlog readers do, like one of the dogs in Martin Seligman's classic learned helplessness experiments whose stress and immune systems eventually are compromised by uncertainty. For entertainment should I be subscribing to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, YouTube +, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, AcornTV, Britbox, Shudder, YouTbue, Facebook Watch, Tubi, etc.? For news, there are too many options to even begin to list them. Apart from my own qualms about using Google as a prosthesis (Blogger, Google Docs, Calendar, Mail, etc.), I look at how my 5 and 7 year old grandsons' lives are potentially compromised by the amount of free time they spend on digital inputs rather than playing outside with friends.

Clips rom Yang's article:

...technology is addictive and damaging the mental health of our children. Research shows that too much time spent on social media increases stress, anxiety, depression and feelings of isolation. Other studies have found that extended screen time can negatively affect sleep...As president, I will establish a Department of the Attention Economy that will work with tech companies and implement regulations that curb the negative effects of smartphones and social media.

A few of his suggestions:

We can start by curbing design features that maximize screen time, such as removing autoplay video and capping recommendations for videos, articles and posts for each user each day. Platforms can also use deep-learning algorithms to determine whether a user is a child, and then explore capping the user's screen hours per day.

Design features that encourage social validation should also be removed. Instagram is leading the way by testing hiding likes on the posts of some users. That's a step in the right direction and it should be implemented as soon as possible. In addition, the number of followers a person has on social media should be hidden too, as it represents a false equivalence with a person's social standing.

Another area that deserves attention is the content our kids consume. When I was growing up, television time meant morning cartoons and after-school specials. Rules and standards should be established to protect kids from graphic content and violent imagery. Subsequently, these regulations would also incentivize the production of high-quality content and positive programming.

It shouldn't stop there. Parents have a major role to play — and they want to — but they could use some help. Companies should be required to provide parents with guidance on kid-healthy content (similar to the rating system for TV or movies), and parents should easily be able to monitor content and screen time for children.

Skill development - the intelligence vs. practice debate reframed

Vaci et al. note that what is often overlooked in the nature vs. nurture debate is the fact that both factors interact with each other:

The relative importance of different factors in the development of human skills has been extensively discussed. Research on expertise indicates that focused practice may be the sole determinant of skill, while intelligence researchers underline the relative importance of abilities at even the highest level of skill. There is indeed a large body of research that acknowledges the role of both factors in skill development and retention. It is, however, unknown how intelligence and practice come together to enable the acquisition and retention of complex skills across the life span. Instead of focusing on the 2 factors, intelligence and practice, in isolation, here we look at their interplay throughout development. In a longitudinal study that tracked chess players throughout their careers, we show that both intelligence and practice positively affect the acquisition and retention of chess skill. Importantly, the nonlinear interaction between the 2 factors revealed that more intelligent individuals benefited more from practice. With the same amount of practice, they acquired chess skill more quickly than less intelligent players, reached a higher peak performance, and arrested decline in older age. Our research demonstrates the futility of scrutinizing the relative importance of highly intertwined factors in human development.

The power of "cute"

I want to point MindBlog readers to an article by Simon May at aeon.co that encapsulates the contents of his new book "The Power of Cute" (2019), and to a Trends in Cognitive Sciences review article by Kringelbach et al. on cuteness that summarizes work on brain activities underlying survival related cuteness responses. The latter article's introduction notes that the prevailing view of cuteness...

...came from the founding fathers of ethology, Nobel prizewinners Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. They proposed that the cute facial features of infants form a ‘Kindchenschema’ (infant schema), a prime example of an ‘innate releasing mechanism’ that unlocks instinctual behaviours...These characteristics contribute to ‘cuteness’ and propel our caregiving behaviours, which is vital because infants need our constant attention to survive and thrive. Infants attract us through all our senses, which helps make cuteness one of the most basic and powerful forces shaping our behaviour.

May considers the increasing popularity of child-like figures in popular culture and asks:

In such uncertain and uneasy times, and with so much injustice, hate and intolerance threatening the world, don’t we have more serious things to focus on than the escapades of that feline girl-figure Hello Kitty? Or Pokémon, the video-game franchise that’s hot again in 2019...The craze for all things cute is motivated, most obviously, by the urge to escape from precisely such a threatening world into a garden of innocence in which childlike qualities arouse deliciously protective feelings, and bestow contentment and solace. Cute cues include behaviours that appear helpless, harmless, charming and yielding, and anatomical features such as outsize heads, protruding foreheads, saucer-like eyes, retreating chins and clumsy gaits.

May suggests that the increasingly popularity of cuteness derives not only from the 'sweet' end of the whole spectrum of cuteness but also from moving towards the 'uncanny' and ambiguous end, a....

...faintly menacing subversion of boundaries – between the fragile and the resilient, the reassuring and the unsettling, the innocent and the knowing – when presented in cute’s frivolous, teasing idiom, is central to its immense popularity... ‘unpindownability’, as we might call it, that pervades cute – the erosion of borders between what used to be seen as distinct or discontinuous realms, such as childhood and adulthood – is also reflected in the blurred gender of many cute objects such as Balloon Dog or a lot of Pokémon. It is reflected, too, in their frequent blending of human and nonhuman forms, as in the cat-girl Hello Kitty. And in their often undefinable age...In such ways, cute is attuned to an era that is no longer so wedded to such hallowed dichotomies as masculine and feminine, sexual and nonsexual, adult and child, being and becoming, transient and eternal, body and soul, absolute and contingent, and even good and bad.

Although attraction to such cute objects as the mouthless, fingerless Hello Kitty can express a desire for power, cuteness can also parody and subvert power by playing with the viewer’s sense of her own power, now painting her into a dominant pose, now sowing uncertainty about who is really in charge...

Infants expect leaders to right wrongs

From Stavans and Baillargeon:

Anthropological and psychological research on direct third-party punishment suggests that adults expect the leaders of social groups to intervene in within-group transgressions. Here, we explored the developmental roots of this expectation. In violation-of-expectation experiments, we asked whether 17-mo-old infants (n = 120) would expect a leader to intervene when observing a within-group fairness transgression but would hold no particular expectation for intervention when a nonleader observed the same transgression. Infants watched a group of 3 bear puppets who served as the protagonist, wrongdoer, and victim. The protagonist brought in 2 toys for the other bears to share, but the wrongdoer seized both toys, leaving none for the victim. The protagonist then either took 1 toy away from the wrongdoer and gave it to the victim (intervention event) or approached each bear in turn without redistributing a toy (nonintervention event). Across conditions, the protagonist was either a leader (leader condition) or a nonleader equal in rank to the other bears (nonleader condition); across experiments, leadership was marked by either behavioral or physical cues. In both experiments, infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer if shown the nonintervention as opposed to the intervention event, suggesting that they expected the leader to intervene and rectify the wrongdoer’s transgression. In contrast, infants in the nonleader condition looked equally at the events, suggesting that they held no particular expectation for intervention from the nonleader. By the second year of life, infants thus already ascribe unique responsibilities to leaders, including that of righting wrongs.