Brainhabit - BabyBrains Stockholm/Uppsala

When we challenge societal norms, we often think we’re creating something entirely new. But what if, in doing so, we’re just building new norms? It’s a curious paradox that has everything to do with how our brains work.

🤯 Our brains are wired to seek consistency. When we break free from old norms, it creates a sense of discomfort, or what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. To relieve this discomfort, our brain pushes us to replace the old beliefs with new ones, which quickly become the new "right" way of thinking.

🛣 This process is supported by neuroplasticity – the brain’s incredible ability to rewire itself. When we challenge the way we think or act, the brain forms new neural pathways, strengthening new behaviors and ideas. Over time, these pathways become our default, solidifying new norms.

💏 Humans are deeply social creatures, and our social brain thrives on belonging. Once a new belief or behavior is accepted in a group, the brain’s reward system kicks in. This release of dopamine makes us feel good, reinforcing the new norm and encouraging us to stick with it.

🪞 On top of that, our mirror neurons help us understand and connect with others. When we see others adopting the same new perspective, these neurons help us empathize and internalize those behaviors, making them feel even more natural.

In the end, the very brain mechanisms that help us break old norms are also the ones that turn the new ones into the next "right" thing. It’s a cycle that reflects our desire for consistency, social connection, and validation.

Some more practical implications of our work...

As parents or caregivers more generally, we often see such seemingly paradoxical traits in (our) children.

How could the same person be highly sensitive but also in need to seek sensory stimulation?

It is highly likely due to the separability across these dimensions and the underlying influences that are unique to each dimension.

In autism, for example, this is also very common. Sensitivity and stimming do often coexist and show very different needs of autistic individuals that can be addressed by more specific strategies of sensory support.

Babies vary significantly in how they experience the world through their senses, and the way they respond to external stimuli appears to have implications for their development across the neurodevelopmental spectrum. This happens in particular in a very crucial time in development when brain circuits supporting social and non-social cognition are sculptured and learning about the world via sensory input largely occurs in interaction with their caregivers.

Recently, we have studied the factors influencing variability among babies in sensory-related behaviour and links with later development of autism.

We found unique genetic influences to each dimension of sensation as observed in the baby’s behaviours by parents, with the strongest influence coming however from shared environment. We interpret this as family environment, which then plays an immense influencing role on how these babies differently respond to the world. Younger infants may hold a more passive behaviour in relation to environmental exposure, therefore, shared environment in the form of parent-mediated exposure to sensory stimuli may play a more relevant role at this young age than later in development.

We also found unique associations with level of autistic traits in toddlerhood, particularly for sensory sensitivity, and we speculate that variability across the spectrum of behavioural and symptom manifestations observed in autism is the result of the interaction across different streams underlying different dimensions of sensory processing early in life, and environmental influences as scaffolded by early sensory experiences.

Early caregiving environment is likely to mediate cascading effects of altered sensory processing in infancy, as we see in parent-mediated interventions conducted on younger siblings of autistic children. Different aspects of parent responsiveness, directiveness and scaffolding may differentially influence a child’s sensory experience in everyday settings, and in turn influence what they learn from the world.

As the year draws to the end, it's time to reflect on all we have accomplished. What a year it has been, 2024 ✨️

A year of change, both on a private and a professional level. It started off with a new job, conducting research in a new field and moving from academia to the industry. Then halfway through it, our family welcomed a new tiny member.

It's hard to realise how fast time goes by when you are in it, but those little feet kicking inside my belly last Christmas are now seeking independence to reach for the Christmas tree.

It has been a challenging year, no doubt, but I am deeply grateful for everything it brought!

For the new amazing people I met and I can call colleagues now. I learned so much and had so much fun doing it!

For the research we are doing, meaningful and impactful, and for all collaborations, the new and the ongoing.

For the little girls, who put everything into perspective and showed us how weaknesses can become strength.

Now we are ready to celebrate Christmas with all our loved ones and welcome the new year full of new hopes and excitement!

Happy holidays 💫

#2024

Always a useful reminder to parents that research is most of the time focussed on groups of children (best if a very large group). While this is great to understand general trends and norms, it cannot tell exactly what applies to an individual child, your child!

It is always a complex interaction between multiple events that shapes the path your child will take, and we are all still out to understand how, both scientists and parents ❤️

As a mom, I understand the stress and anxiety that parents may feel reading about scientific 'facts' on child development shared on social media. All this information can be overwhelming!

As a scientist, I am aware of what science can or cannot tell us (yet, at least); or what is good or less good science to rely upon (there is also much 'fake science' around, unfortunately).

Not too long ago, I have talked about this on , sharing my experience balancing motherhood with neuroscience, and some tips for parents to navigate information overload on social media.

Here the link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/55pmbF8IaKlJlNlZ27VWjZ?si=9FlQQEFJQsWYK0VdIekJHg

Science is so much fun and kids are the best at it!

Back to work after Summer vacation and I am super excited for this new semester!

So now the count down has started for SciFest!

I can't wait to meet children and students with their teachers and families to show what we do and talk about science, starting from some of our central questions in the lab:

What is it that captures your attention? And how easy is it to keep (or loose) your focus?

Scientists use the eyes as a window to the brain to answer those questions. From where you look and how you look at things, we can understand so much about what grabs your attention, what are your interests, your strategies for learning and possibly your inner state and emotions.

At the science festival, everyone will get a chance to try it out themselves, see what their eyes can tell, learn more on the role of attention in our daily lives, and have a taste of what it means to be a scientist in developmental psychology!

New preprint out!

Here we investigated automated reactions to different sounds in combination with videos, as reflected in change in pupil size. We did that with infants between age 4 and 6 months to test how they reacted to events that might happen across different senses (audio + video: a toy car crashing onto a wall with a beep sound playing), or random presentations of sounds during a video.

We observed a different reaction to a meaningful event (toy car crashing) than the random sound happening while the car is driving around. Changes in pupil size pointed to a different level of engagement. One that is more captured by the immediate saliency of a surprising event but fades right away (random event), the other is slower but more sustained in cognitive effort, likely making sense of something more meaningful that just happened (coherent sound and car crash).

We also wanted to see if reactions changed after repetitions of the same stimuli (remember how habituation can be helpful to screen out stimuli that are not relevant). And we actually observed indications of habituation to the different sounds already at this very young age.

This highlights how useful measures of pupil size can be for us to understand the way infants sense and interpret the world around them. We will continue testing on more infants after the Summer break, also following up with these young infants to see how these reactions change across development in the first year of life, and testing potentially relevant links to daily life experience in relation to sensory behaviours, sleep and crying.

Here the study:

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/pnkdw

Out now!

A very nice collaborative effort, together with Valentina Riva and Livio Provenzi, on a special Research Topic we care about deeply: the influence of family and caregiving environment on child development.

Featuring scientific work on European, South-American, African and Asian samples, here we provide evidence on the influence of the family and caregiving environment on child development, highlighting its relevant role in the presence of specific environmental or genetic risk factors, and further highlighting how improving the quality of the early care environment might be crucial in supporting the health and development of children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

We hope for this to be just the beginning and for further collaborations to be initiated among researchers, clinicians and policy-makers investing on sensitive caregiving and parental support to promote child development!

Here a link to the editorial and research topic:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1221338/full

Feeling energized after a 3-day conference on autism research. It reminded me why I do what I do and what it really means to be a scientist.

I really needed that as sometimes you get stuck in everyday routines and unhealthy loops focussing on getting the job done, while the frustration goes up and up. Then, why was that?

That's because it's hard to be a scientist (no news) and keep being true to science. To me, being a scientist means trying to explain the impossible, learn about the unknown, do the hard work that nobody believes would be possible, admitting that there are things you don't know while always trying to improve and learn more. I come from Physics and I am inspired by the great name of scientists from the past who broke through skepticism and gained recognition only after death. Being a scientist is not for glory or money, it's for curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

Today, we are found often running simple errands while we chase a permanent academic position. Choosing simple, mostly bureaucratic tasks, answering simple questions, writing papers that contribute little to no meaningful knowledge, grabbing low-hanging fruits too often, forgetting that the ones on top of the tree would be the most juicy and nutritious of all. While necessary to keep a job in this world, it often kills that flame of wonder and probably contributes to that mistrust in science that we see more and more in people.

Instead, last weekend I was inspired again by the scientific discussions on hard, to some extent philosophical questions and the debate among scientists who are not afraid to embark on a difficult journey. Science needs more scientific integrity, not only in being honest in how you do what you do but also in the why.

To celebrate Autism Awareness Day, I want to share an aspect of the autistic condition that is often overlooked but is key to our understanding of autism: variability.

As a researcher, I investigate neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual variability across development, and in relation to autism in particular. The issue here interests me personally and professionally.

Not by chance they say: 'when you have seen a person with autism, you have seen a person with autism!"

This urges us to move away from stereotyped images of autistic people and the idea of autism as a disease that needs to be cured. There has been fierce debate on the matter, and particularly in relation to the neurodiversity framework. There, autism is seen as part of natural variability in brain development.

As for everything, variations can lead to a certain amount of advantage or disadvantage. And here comes my provocative question today.

How would you define the ability to hear a pin drop from meters away? To see details that others not even notice? To sense subtle light or temperature changes? To smell colours or taste sounds?

In a Marvel or DC world, these would definitely be some hero superpowers.

These are also characteristics often reported by autistic people as a result of sensory alterations. However, we are not in a Marvel or DC world (unfortunately!), and this world is a difficult one to live in for those with superpowers and their families. We live in a very loud world built around a frenetic and endless chase of something else, something more. Constant change, instability, unpredictability, chaos.

This creates a lot of distress, fear and anxiety in people who feel things and process emotions differently. What happens then? Those that would be superpowers in a comic book, we see in real life as disturbing features, symptoms, something we don’t want, something we want to cure, something that make parents worried and concerned about.

It is clear that autism may come with difficulties as much as strengths. It remains to see whether difficulties are always the result of personal characteristics or rather surrounding environment.

After all, hibiscus does not thrive in the snow. Yet, you can't deny their beauty!

Did I start teaching geography?

Not exactly. I just gave the first lecture of the course in developmental psychology and we did a brilliant exercise.

Everyone had to pinpoint their place of origin. We had a nicely heterogeneous group of internationals today and that is a great strength in studying development.

We study how and why a person changes throughout life, from the very first baby steps to the elderly age. I want to understand how every person is different and why, and I cannot do that without considering what happens around them, in terms of familial, cultural, societal and historical forces.

It is a very ambitious aim for developmental psychology to make sense of chaos across generations throughout a whole world. Discussing different perspectives among people from very different parts of the world is not only the first step; it is indeed very exciting!