ELEMENTS OF SURPRISE HELPS BABIES LEARN

Infants have innate knowledge about the world and when their expectations are defied, they learn best, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found.

In a paper to be published April 3 in the journalScience, cognitive psychologists Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson demonstrate for the first time that babies learn new things by leveraging the core information they are born with. When something surprises a baby, like an object not behaving the way a baby expects it to, the baby not only focuses on that object, but ultimately learns more about it than from a similar yet predictable object.

"For young learners, the world is an incredibly complex place filled with dynamic stimuli. How do learners know what to focus on and learn more about, and what to ignore? Our research suggests that infants use what they already know about the world to form predictions. When these predictions are shown to be wrong, infants use this as a special opportunity for learning," said Feigenson, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in the university's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "When babies are surprised, they learn much better, as though they are taking the occasion to try to figure something out about their world."

The two researchers' study involved four experiments with preverbal 11-month-old babies, designed to determine whether babies learned more effectively about objects that defied their expectations. If they did, researchers wondered if babies would also seek out more information about surprising objects and if this exploration meant babies were trying to find explanations for the objects' strange behavior.

First the researchers showed the babies both surprising and predictable situations regarding an object. For instance, one group of infants saw a ball roll down a ramp and appear to be stopped by a wall in its path. Another group saw the ball roll down the ramp and appear to pass -- as if by magic -- right through the wall.

When the researchers gave the babies new information about the surprising ball, the babies learned significantly better. In fact, the infants showed no evidence of learning about the predictable ball. Furthermore, the researchers found that the babies chose to explore the ball that had defied their expectations, even more than toys that were brand new but had not done anything surprising.

The researchers found that the babies didn't just learn more about surprising objects -- they wanted to understand them. For instance, when the babies saw the surprising event in which the ball appeared to pass through the wall, they tested the ball's solidity by banging it on the table. But when babies saw a different surprising event, in which the ball appeared to hover in midair, they tested the ball's gravity by dropping it onto the floor. These results suggest that babies were testing specific hypotheses about the objects' surprising behavior.

"The infants' behaviors are not merely reflexive responses to the novelty of surprising outcomes, but instead reflect deeper attempts to learn about aspects of the world that failed to accord with expectations," said Stahl, the paper's lead author and a doctoral student in psychological and brain sciences.

"Infants are not only equipped with core knowledge about fundamental aspects of the world, but from early in their lives, they harness this knowledge to empower new learning."

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

BABIES INTEREST IN FACES LINKED TO CALLOUS EMOTIONAL TRAITS

Scientists at King's College London, the University of Manchester, and the University of Liverpool have found that an infant's preference for a person's face, rather than an object, is associated with lower levels of callous and unemotional behaviors in toddlerhood.

The study, published in Biological Psychiatry, assessed if 213 five-week-old infants spent longer tracking a person's face compared to an inanimate object -- in this case a red ball. The researchers showed that greater tracking of the face relative to the ball was linked to lower callous unemotional behaviors measured using questionnaires when children were two and a half years old. The study also showed that if a mother responds more sensitively to their baby during playtime, then the child is less likely to display callous unemotional behavior as a toddler.

Callous and unemotional behaviors include a lack of guilt and empathy, reduced concern for other's distress and difficulties with understanding emotions. In older children and adults, callous unemotional traits have been associated with reduced attention to important social features such as other people's faces and eyes. This study is the first to examine whether such a relationship is present from the first few weeks of life.

This is the latest finding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Wirral Child Health and Development Study, an ongoing interdisciplinary investigation into the interplay of social and biological factors in the emotional and cognitive development of children. The children are currently being followed to test whether face preference in infancy can predict callous unemotional behavior through to middle childhood.

Dr Rachael Bedford, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Biostatistics Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, says: "Callous and unemotional behaviors in children are known to be associated with an increased emotional burden on families as well as later criminality and antisocial behavior. This study takes us a step further in understanding the earliest origins of callous and unemotional behaviors. An important next step will be to seek replication of the findings before working towards developing early interventions."

Dr Jonathan Hill, University of Manchester, says: "While our findings are interesting, we don't yet know how stable callous unemotional behaviors are. Our follow-up work will assess how these early indicators affect children in later life."

EARTHQUAKES PROVE TO BE AN UNEXPECTED HELP IN INTERPRETING BRAIN ACTIVITY OF VERY PREMATURE BABIES

University of Helsinki researchers have partnered with Swedish and Australian researchers to create a "brainstorm barometer," which allows computers to calculate the brain functions of very premature babies during their first hours of life. The new research method is based on the hypothesis that the brainstorms generated by the billions of neurons inside a baby's head are governed by the same rules as other massive natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, forest fires or snow avalanches.

Giant strides have been taken in the early care of very premature infants in postnatal intensive care units during the past two decades. Doctors can now support the function of especially the lungs, heart and the circulatory system so as to guarantee the survival of most of even extremely premature infants. Despite a good start, many of these may still have lifelong problems with brain function, such as attention deficit disorders or difficulty with visual function. For this reason, the primary focus of developing care for premature infants has been on securing brain development.

The biggest risks in the development of a very premature baby are concentrated on the first days of life, when intensive care seeks to find the care balance suitable for each individual child.

"At this stage it would be vitally important to be able to track the child's brain function and to identify the babies whose brains are at particular risk," says Sampsa Vanhatalo, PhD, who leads the University of Helsinki's Baby Brain Activity (BABA) research group based at the HUS Children's Hospital.

The brains of very premature babies being treated in intensive care have been tracked with continuous electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring, but evaluating the EEG results has proven to be a challenge:

"The brain function of very premature babies is completely different from that of older children or adults, meaning that the currently used methods of EEG interpretation are poorly suited for use on premature babies," Vanhatalo explains.

Storms help the brain mature

Researchers have found that certain episodes, brainstorms of a kind, occur in the brains of very premature babies and are critical for the maturation of the baby's brain. Together with Swedish and Australian researchers, Vanhatalo has now developed a completely new way of evaluating such brainstorms in newborn very premature infants.

"Our research was published in the journal Brain, and it is the result of exceptionally broad-based international cooperation. It involved specialists of different medical fields, physicists, mathematicians and engineers," Vanhatalo says.

The patient material for the research came from Dr. Lena Hellström-Westas' research on premature babies in Sweden. Hellström-Westas is a professor in neonatology at Uppsala University. Vanhatalo contributed the neurophysiological expertise of his research group. Finally, Professor Michael Breakspear's computational neuroscience research group in Australia developed a new kind of analysis method for the EEG signal.

The laws of nature hold true in the brain

Breakspear's research group began to develop mathematical methods used in geology and basic physics research after it was found that the brainstorms in very premature babies were astonishingly similar to the "crackling noise" that occurs on small scales in weakly magnetised metals and large-scales during earthquakes.

Ultimately, the research groups worked together to generate a clear instrument, a brainstorm barometer if you will, which can be used by a computer to calculate the state of a very premature baby's brain during the first hours of life. Of greatest clinical interest was the observation that the results from this barometer correlated significantly with the child's cognitive development at age two.

"In terms of science, this has already revolutionised the idea of what we can observe of the brain function in very premature babies. This method is the first source of objective data on the messages the brain of a very premature baby may be sending to the doctors taking care of the child during the first hours of life," Vanhatalo describes. "It's still too early to say how the brainstorm measurements we have discovered will impact the care given to each premature baby. Our discovery helps doctors identify which children are in need of special attention, and which ones have brains that are fine on their own. This is crucial information that opens the door for new targeted care studies."

The EEG instrument created in the study is a collection of sophisticated mathematical functions, combined ingeniously to create a software component for analysing the EEG signal. This component can be added to the software of existing brain monitors. In terms of technology, the adoption of the method is no more difficult than downloading new apps onto our smartphones.

"The interest of EEG monitor manufacturers to engage in product development will be the bottleneck. Luckily the market is very competitive, and new manufacturers need to introduce innovations that are necessary for hospital work," Vanhatalo points out.