#90. Why Toddlers Can't Help Themselves (Yet) - Dr. Abigail Fiske

What happens inside a child's brain when they're told not to touch something… and immediately reach for it anyway?

In this episode we sit down with developmental neuroscientist Dr. Abigail Fiske from Lancaster University to explore how self-control develops in infancy and early childhood.

Dr. Fisk studies executive functions, which are the mental skills that help us focus, regulate behaviour, and resist impulses. Using child friendly brain-imaging technology (FNIRS) and longitudinal research, she follows children from infancy through early childhood to understand how these critical abilities emerge and develop.

We discuss:

• Why toddlers struggle with self-control
• What executive functions actually are
• How inhibitory control develops in the brain
• Measuring brain activity in babies using non-invasive neuroimaging
• The role of the prefrontal cortex in early development
• Lessons from the classroom that inspired Dr. Fisk's research career
• Why the first five years of life are so important
• Early intervention, education, and the future of child development research

Whether you're a parent, educator, psychology enthusiast, or simply curious about how the brain develops, this conversation offers fascinating insights into the science behind self-control and learning.

Transcript

0:03

so hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Smooth Brain Society. So you know that moment when a toddler just loses it, can't help themselves, grabs the things you said not to grab, melts down on the supermarket. Yeah. Well, what if I told you that their brain is literally learning how not to do that in real time? Well, today to explain that further, we're talking to Dr. Abigail Fisk from Lancaster University. A neuroscientist who literally puts light-sensitive caps on babies' heads to watch their brains while they're learning self-control. She's been tracking the same kids from 10 months old all the way through early childhood, even managing to keep up with it during the pandemic, mapping what happens in the prefrontal cortex while they're learning inhibitory control. Abigail completed her D Phil in Experimental Psychology at Oxford, and her work was recognized with the British Psychology. Psychological Society's Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research in 2024. Whoop whoop. The research combines developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how executive functions actually develop in those critical early years. Not in theory, but by measuring real babies' brains as they learn and grow. Welcome, Abigail. Thank so much for that intro, it was amazing! Good. Excellent. I'm glad it will. Thank you. Thank you for joining. It is lovely to have you here. Yeah, looking forward to it! Um, so if we're happy to just go, should we start with our I love this question, your origin story. How did it all come about where you are today? My origin story. Well, I don't think Marvel are going to make a film about this. I guess I can kind of start off. Yeah, so before I started my career in kind of research and academia, I actually had a career as a primary school teacher. So when I finished my undergraduate degree, which was in psychology, I actually trained as a primary school teacher and worked as a primary school teacher for four years. m and had some amazing experiences in the classroom, loved working with children of all ages. um But it was actually in the classroom that I started to really pay attention to these kind of executive function skills, which I'm now researching. And it was in the classroom where I kind of noticed the differences in the children that I was working with. And I was very curious about understanding more about the role that these skills play in the classroom. And so I was thinking, actually, I want to go back. university and I want to understand more about this. So I was able to find a master's programme which allowed me to kind of explore this a little bit in more detail and then eventually that led to my PhD at the University of Oxford where I kind of went to the other end of the spectrum and so instead of working with primary school aged children, went right to the very start of life working with infants. to try and understand, okay, we know these skills are super important in the classroom. I've seen that for myself, but actually where do they emerge? How do they develop? And how do we get to that point where children are in the primary school classroom? so that's fun. So you kind of you did it in instead of like, you know, most kind of academics say, you know, they go straight from um the BSc to the masters to the PhD, you kind of were like, Nope, I'm gonna get, you know, all this kind of like um actual uh understanding of what's going on in the classrooms and what about the children instead of the kind of the academic kind of like understanding first, which is actually probably better to understand actually what's the kind of the problem or like the the the the target and then kind of learning how am I gonna learn more about that. I love that. yeah it really kind of grounded my research now right because I kind of always go back to actually what this looked like in my day-to-day life as a teacher and in the day-to-day experiences of the children in the classroom and so it kind of just puts this extra layer of meaning into what I'm doing because I have that experience of yeah why this is actually important in real life so yeah that's been really cool. Yeah, excellent. So what would you say those those early years in the classroom and what do they teach you about child development that maybe the textbooks didn't or maybe what you know a lot of academics don't get? It's okay, we can say that. What a great question. So one of the main things I think is that you can't get from a textbook is just how when we consider an aspect of development as researchers, that is our world. We are just focusing on that one particular skill or area of development and we maybe tend to ignore what's happening around that skill and actually forgets sometimes that this is a little person, this is a child who's having a life in the world and beyond the thing that we're interested in, actually they're also developing their social skills and their language skills and their ability to catch a ball and they have family relationships. And I think being in the classroom really kind of put that into. something you can't ignore because these children come in every day and they tell stories about things that have been happening and we see these other skills develop. It isn't just happening in isolation for the thing that we're interested in, but often that is how we tend to study it. yeah, it's been really interesting to kind of keep that at the focus. Actually, this is a child who has lots of things beyond the skill that we're looking at. it. Um so okay, so uh background completely understand child development. What's made you specifically start to look at executive function development with your um supervisors? Yeah, so executive functions are cognitive skills that we know are really, important for learning. And they are skills that we see every day in the classroom that are very obvious and cannot be ignored. So things like the ability to listen and follow instructions, the ability to ignore distractors, which are everywhere in a classroom environment. and the ability to kind of remember the rule that you need to follow for a specific task and then actually how to change that when you're moving your attention onto a different kind of task. So all of these skills are so present in the classroom and essential skills for learning. So it kind of made sense for me coming from that kind of education background to understand, you know, when we go back, what these skills look like in infancy and toddlerhood and actually try and figure out how they get from their sort of very rudimentary basic skills to these really complicated and sophisticated skills that the children need in the classroom. so cool. So I guess my first question would be then how do you look at these skills? I feel how how do you study a infant? It's not like they can talk at this point. So you can't really like ask or judge them. I I know you can see the growth of their language skills, but what are the sort of techniques you use to actually study these? Yeah, so that's a big question. And the very short answer to that is it is very difficult to study these skills in infants and toddlers because of the reasons you just suggested, right? So children of this age don't yet have language skills, so we can't sort of ask and answer questions with them. And also they are still very much developing their memory capacity. So when we are thinking about how to measure skills like memory attention, impulse control, we're really restricted in what we can do, right, because these young children can't follow instructions to complete a task, for example, which is something we might do if we were working with maybe school aged children, we could, we could give them a set of instructions about how to complete an activity and that would be able to measure their executive function skills. But that's just, that's not gonna work with babies and toddlers, right. And so one of the biggest challenges actually in the field that I work in is this, this lack of methodology and lack of tasks that we can use to assess early executive function skills. A lot of progress has happened in terms of researchers being really creative to develop tasks that are suitable for infants and toddlers who aren't yet able to talk. And we've made really good use of technology to help us to do that. So a common method that's used in developmental psychology is eye tracking. And eye tracking is where the infant would not need any instructions. They would be able to look at something happening on a screen and what we present them would be carefully designed to kind of assess their ability to maybe remember the location of a toy that they were just shown, for example. And the eye tracking would essentially follow their eye movement around the screen. And from that, we can make inferences about their understanding and their behavior. And that's as I suggested, that doesn't involve any sort of need for communication. We also have, or my supervisor, Dr. Carla Holmbo has developed a really cool iPad task that has allowed us to measure inhibitory control from infants actually as young as 10 months of age, and actually is a task that can be used with all ages across the lifespan. Sorry, can I just pause very quickly and ask you what inhibitory control is? Sure. Yeah, so I guess I've kind of used a couple of phrases so far that might maybe thinking about inhibitory control. So the first thing I said was in the classroom, I said about ignoring distractors. And then I also said about impulse control. And so inhibitory control, kind of the definition that I work with for inhibitory control is the ability to kind of stop or prevent yourself from acting on habit or on impulse. So we think sometimes of examples like m driving. So imagine you're somebody who drives a manual car, you're very used to going for a gear stick to change gear when you come to a junction, for example. m But imagine your car is in the workshop and you have a higher car for the day and it's an automatic car. Now when you approach a junction you might automatically reach for a gear stick that you don't need because you're in an automatic car and so actually you've got that habitual response which is reaching for the gear stick but now in this situation that's no longer required to meet your goal so it would be necessary to kind of inhibit that response in order to then achieve your goal of maneuvering up the junction or whatever. So in infants we obviously measure that in a very different way but of still the same underlying idea that we're asking them to inhibit an impulsive response or an automatic response. And so the iPad task that Dr. Carla Hongbo created is measuring exactly that. It's measuring children's ability to m overcome a response that we've sort of trained them in. So the basics of this is that m infancy m two blue kind of buttons, either side of a iPad and one of them has a smiley face. And we teach them that when they touch the smiley face, a little cartoon animation appears with some music, it's really sweet. So they're very quickly able to pick up on this kind of stimulus response idea that when I touch the smiley face, I see a little cartoon. So that happens on the same side of the screen for the majority of the trials, but then to assess their ability to kind of overcome or inhibit that response, on 25 % of the trials we put the smiley face on the opposite side of the screen. So now babies are really well practiced at responding on this side of the screen, for example, but all of a sudden the smiley face is on the opposite side. And so what they need to do if they can, is to stop that response, the automatic response to one side of the screen, inhibit that. and then actually make the alternative response on the opposite side of the screen in order to see the smiley face. And we find that infants are able to do this task really well. Well, they're able to access the task and complete the task, but their inhibitory control abilities are very poor, as we would expect. So yeah, creativity in the way in which we assess these skills with very young children. Uh I I guess the follow up question would be at what age sort of do you start seeing this inability control on that iPad task improve? yeah.'Cause I feel brains develop in kids really quickly. Yeah, exactly. we've measured this task now, we've used this task now, sorry, to measure inhibitory control, as I said, from 10 month olds, all the way through kind of toddlerhood, early childhood, and it actually can be used with adults too. And it's around sort of the toddlerhood years that we start to see improvement in this task. So, in my PhD research, I followed the same group of children and it was when they reached three and a half years of age that we started to see pretty high accuracy in terms of their inhibition. They were much better able to prevent themselves from making that automatic response. But interestingly, they were much slower when they had to respond to the opposite side. So there's this kind of speed accuracy trade-off that happens in early childhood that allows them to be successful in inhibiting but actually It takes a little bit longer for the brain to put that stopping kind of thing in place. I mean, d to to be fair, going back to your car example, even in adulthood, it takes a while to get used to certain things. for example, I was just in Iceland and they drive on the other side of the road to the UK and the first twenty minutes of me having a car there, like trying to inhibit all my natural instincts of taking a left instead of taking a right and s so on. So I I understand the plight of a three year old having to Yeah. the screen. all the time in real life right as adults like and I don't know we if you move something in your kitchen cabinet from one side to the other like you will still instinctively go to the where it was previously even though you know that you've moved it to the other side of the kitchen but your brain kind of is just a little bit slower remembering because we've made quite a strong connection to that particular place so yeah it kind of does take us even as adults sometimes relearn those things. So when we ask young children to do this we have to expect that. Yeah it's going to still be very very difficult. Is there like a I guess 'cause I'm I know you've only gone up like three and a half years, is there like a kind of peak age where, you know, impulse control, you know, we're particularly good at impulse control? So that's a good question. I know that, so I don't do research with adolescents, but I know that in adolescence, we start to see some more challenges with impulse control again, or some differences in impulse control, which is really interesting because it's of similar to what we might expect or what we might experience in toddlerhood, right? Where young children are still having difficulties with impulse control or inhibitory control. because of the development and I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but because of the development that's happening in their brain. And then you compare that to a period again of huge brain changing in adolescence. And we again start to see those really interesting differences in inhibitory control. And that follows through actually then to another period in life of kind of older adults and aging, where we again start to see slowing in things like inhibitory control. So it's a really interesting kind of lifespan trajectory. And I don't know exactly when the kind of peak of inhibitory control development is, but it's interesting to think about those periods of change. It feels like when the brain is at its most stable, isn't it? So those stablish periods I guess are like t late twenties, early thirties, maybe for a little bit, and then uh No mass decline. No, I'm joking. There's no mass decline Please don't don't worry, people. so yeah, so you've kind of like explained um the executive control and it in toddlers, but I guess the big question and I know that you'll this will be your first thought when you do these things is why does this matter? Um so executive function in early childhood, um is it linked to all sorts of outcomes in life, for example? Why, why, why, why research it? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one of these things that you kind of can ask anybody about their research. Why should we care? What does this matter? But one of the things I think that's so great about studying executive functions is really like it is clear to see how important they are. I've already talked a little bit about coming from the classroom and understanding how important executive functions are for learning in the classroom. And researchers suggested that executive function skills are quite clearly associated with skills like early mathematics, um early language skills, and even scientific kind of inquiry and those sorts of skills too. We know that m executive function skills do continue to have an effect on kind of academic achievement and things like sort of secondary school assessments um and throughout. And there's also been some really m Meaningful, think, longitudinal research that suggested that kind of children's self-control in those early years can go on to predict things even like their health, their mental well-being, their financial outcomes, things like criminality and substance misuse in adulthood. And so those kinds of findings are really significant and kind of put things in perspective when I'm... looking at these skills as they emerge to think actually these are going to have significant importance for children at every stage of their life. And even if it was just something that was important for education, right, I think that would still be very meaningful to be able to understand, okay, what is it that underlies learning that children will need throughout their education career and how can we understand this better and is there anything we can do to support the development of these skills? Yeah. You've like but literally just started on the next question. But I guess this is probably the next part of the research, which is what can you do to have better self control when you're a uh a toddler if if that's gonna be so important. But it sounds like it really days on that. all the toddlers out there are asking this exact question. No, that's a really great question. So one of the things we are sort of trying to understand in this research is what is supporting this kind of self-control or executive control development in toddlerhood. And we know, as I said, that toddlers aren't very good at doing this. they rely very heavily at this age on kind of experience and the responses that they get during those experiences. having the opportunity to practice self-control or being sort of challenged in situations by parents or caregivers that maybe you need to practice self-control is the best way for young children to learn. not only are they going to have the experience and kind of understand it feels like when you need to have self-control or inhibit a response, you're also going to learn from how the caregivers and parents around you respond to that. So whether they're sort of able to support you and give you encouragement about, know, if you can wait for this now, you're going to have a really exciting treat later. You learn techniques like distraction and that often comes from parents, right? toddlers or young children are sort of desperately asking for something, but they need to wait. Parents are very good at playing little games or telling stories and things that sort of take the child's mind off of it to enable them to kind of cope with the difficult sensation, right, of having to wait for something. And it's funny because you might have seen online on social media and stuff, parents doing these kinds of challenges with their toddlers, right, where they set up like their phone recording and they put something like a cake or something really nice, you know in front of the toddler and they sort of say, you know, I'm just gonna go and get something don't eat it yet or if you wait until I come back you can have another one or so, you know and then they of course leave the room and they've set up the video recording and you can see how the toddlers respond to that em and that's actually the It's very amusing to watch, but actually it's very similar to one of the tasks we use in the lab. And what we're doing during those, that period of waiting is looking at the strategies that children choose to use to help them with that wait time. Of course, some children won't have any strategies, the temptation may be too strong and they can't resist, but some children will show other strategies that maybe they've learned. So things like physically turning away. so you can't see whatever it is, the cake or whatever. Some children may distract themselves by singing or telling a story or whatever it might be. And it's really fascinating to kind of observe those behaviors. I think one of the ways, yeah, we can support young children during that kind of learning of self-control is to give them the opportunity to practice and demonstrate kind of some skills and strategies they can use to help with that. Yeah. That's really interesting. Was it I was gonna say, was it Diamond et al. the study that did it did the self control with with children's study, I think. So it's like it's actually been scientifically as well as the parents doing it. I think Haribo did an advert probably as well. Yeah, so this is a really famous kind of sets of experimental set up. came from the Marshmallow test, which came out of think Stanford University in like the 70s or something. And lots of researchers have kind of adapted this task in many different ways throughout this kind of time. And there's been really fascinating studies that have shown like children's behavior on that exact kind of task. can predict lifelong outcomes in terms of their executive function skills. So really fascinating actually. Yeah, it is. It's yeah. I mean it's I I always love it when things like like scientific research kind of p passes over to something so s so that everybody can do it and can see the outcomes. It's it's f it's fun. It's a lot of fun. It is fun and it's great for me to see these on Instagram when they come up because I'm like, what's that child doing as their strategy? But yeah, exactly. This is a sort of study that a task sorry that we've included in my own research where we gave children a sort of and we told them that we had a gift for them and it was in this beautiful gold bag. But we had to say, no, you know, forgotten the shiny gift bow that goes with it. So I'm just going to go and find it, but I'll leave the gift here, know, try not to touch it until we come back. And we have sort of cameras rigged up in the room and everything. And we leave the child for three minutes, which feels like an eternity. And of course we look for the behaviors that the child shows towards that, whether they're sort of peeking in, whether they've gone and taken the toy, what they do towards it. And so one of our studies here has sort of looked at the behaviors that are shown and we kind of make this, we have this coding scheme that allows us to kind of track what strategies children are using and we can use that then to predict their kind of scores and other executive function tasks as well. So it's really, really interesting. So kind of moving on on how, because I appreciate this kind of like you look at the children how they do it. I'm also you've didn't done some stuff with functional near near infrared spectroscopy. We'll call it FNIS from now on. Um how does that how does that link in um with what you've done? And also what is FNIS as well? Firstly, well done on your pronunciation. FNIRS, yes. So FNIRS is a relatively new, I say relatively new technology. It's been sort of used now for about 20, 25 years. But it's a infant and child friendly neuroimaging technique that allows us to essentially understand a little bit more about what regions of the children's brain are sort of during specific tasks and the way it works is that it uses near-infrared light which is completely safe and part of the sort of spectrum of light and it shines into the child's head and basically the way that it kind of the light comes back to the detector on the hat allows us to understand which parts of the brain are busy consuming oxygen. if they're busy consuming oxygen we we can kind of infer that that means they are sort of involved in whatever it is that the child is doing. So essentially they just wear like a little swimming hat that has lots of sensors attached to it. It's quite comfortable and you just well you just it takes a lot of effort and lot of practice to be able to get it onto a wriggly toddler's head. But once it's on, and they're usually pretty happy with it, and we can then use the FNIRS kit to understand a bit more about what's happening in the brain, for example, when children are completing an inhibitory control task. we talked a little bit at the beginning about like, how do we measure these skills in this age group? And so FNIRS is another tool that we have that's been really valuable to help us really provide that. missing piece of understanding that we need when we think about development over this period. So we've been able to find ways to measure behaviour and we've talked about some of them, but to be able to understand what's happening in the brain during that behaviour, but also longitudinally over time. So as we mentioned, my research follows the same children across different age points. So when we can compare, okay, what was the brain doing during this task when they were 10 months old? to what's the brain doing now that they are 16 months old and completing the same task. We can start to see kind of how the brain and behavior are related and what's maybe driving improvement in these skills over time. So the next question would be what have you like kind of found when you've seen when you sort of do this with a ten month old versus a sixteen month old? Yeah, so this is really quite fascinating. So I should say that when I was doing this research for my PhD, we really didn't have any information about what's happening in young infants' brains during inhibitory control tasks because it's so difficult to measure. So when we started this, didn't really know what we were going to find. We had some ideas based on research that used other techniques such as EEG or research with adults, but we didn't know what we would expect with infants. And what we found when the infants were 10 months of age was that when they were trying to inhibit their responses, we saw areas of the prefrontal cortex, particularly on the right side of the prefrontal cortex. as well as areas of the parietal cortex, again, just on the right-hand side, were working hard during that period. We were really excited about that because those areas, the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, particularly the right side, have been found in adults. So when we saw it already at 10 months, we were like, yes, we're seeing something here that could be meaningful about how inhibitory control develops. we know that the 10 month olds weren't really very good at inhibiting, but we saw this activation. When the children came back at 16 months, they completed again the same task with the FNIRS kit. And here we saw that they were no better at 16 months than they were at 10 months. So behaviorally they hadn't, or they weren't able to demonstrate any improvement in their inhibitory control skills, which was fascinating. We weren't expecting that. We thought there might be some improvement. But what we weren't expecting and what was really interesting is that at 16 months we saw some real differences in the areas of the brain that were being used when children were trying to inhibit. So now we saw activation on both sides of the brain, again in the prefrontal cortex, but now we saw some em areas involved that we hadn't seen previously. So now we start to see involvement of the right inferior frontal gyrus, which is a key kind of indicator of inhibitory control in em adults. And we also saw involvement of the left parietal cortex as well. Essentially, whilst at 10 months we were seeing brain activity just on the right hand side, at 16 months, despite there being no change in performance, children were now recruiting both sides of the brain and actually a sort more diverse region of the brain. So that was really fascinating because if we'd have just done this behaviourally, we wouldn't have really had a story to tell. Well, we would have had a story to tell, but we wouldn't have been able to sort of understand what that meant. So what we kind of conclude from that is that there's significant maturation that's happening in the brain from 10 to 16 months. And some of that involves this wider recruitment of brain areas to support inhibition, but behaviour that hasn't quite come through yet, as having improved. And so that was really super fascinating. And yeah. Yeah. I I guess then uh by the age of like two years or something, would you then see all these areas which are being used kind of show up in behavioral differences as well? Then d have you done FNEAs with old like older toddlers as well or? So this is exactly my key question. And as was mentioned earlier, this research was happening during the pandemic, well, kind of either side of the pandemic. And so the intention of the study was that we would continue following these children when they were two years old and two and a half years old, exactly to answer the questions you just raised. But because of the pandemic, the study was usually disrupted. And so we couldn't test those children at that age. And the nature of longitudinal work with kids is that those kids are going to keep getting older. They aren't going to stop just in time for the study. So we actually don't have the data from two and two and a half, but what we do have um is data from these children when they're three and a half. And that was because sort of with the timing of the pandemic, I really wanted to catch the children again before they started school, which happens around four years of age. So luckily we were able to see them again at three and a half. Now, of course there's a huge difference in time from 16 months to three and a half years and so substantial development, right? So as we would have expected, the children now at three and a half are much more accurate when they're asked to inhibit, they're much better at it, we would expect that. But we're now seeing in the brain that the activation goes back to the right hemisphere. And that's really fascinating because research in adults again seems to suggest that the right hemisphere is quite important in terms of the frontal and the parietal cortex in inhibitory control. it may, we have an incomplete picture, right? At least from my research, but it may suggest that by three and a half, we're starting to see a more adult like kind of recruitment of these brain regions. Whereas maybe in toddlerhood from 16 months where we see this kind of bilateral involvement. I might suspect that we continue to see that in toddlerhood and at some point there will be this shift back to sort of the more mature, right localized activation. this is a question that I'm hoping to conduct more research to actually find out. Yeah, that's like so interesting. So it seems like he's saying kind of from what I could tell, from when they're about sixteen months, there is recruitment of lots of different regions. Looking at the white matter pathways would be fascinating. Um and then and then later on it goes just back down just to those kind of like right hemispheres. So it's almost like pruning back almost, do you think? Yeah, yeah. yeah it's like specialization of that kind of network and which is fascinating yeah and it's just so frustrating that that kind of the answers of how we get to that point are kind of in that missing period of missing data and my my future research is like I need those toddlers need to get those toddlers and I need to yeah see what what happens in their brains to hopefully fill in this picture I'm also thinking about 'cause we mentioned adoles adolescence is another time where sort of inhibitory control is sort of impacted and there's times of heap heaps of changes. Would you see s similar sort of activity then or is it are they for completely different reasons? Yeah, this is an incredibly interesting question. And I don't know the answer to that. But I think it's a good hypothesis, right? Like that we would expect this period of change in the brain with adolescents for there to be maybe some differences or change when we're thinking about inhibitory control. But what direction that goes in or what specific regions of the brain are implicated? I mean, I would suggest there would be differences in the prefrontal cortex, right? Because we know those areas of the brain are really important for these higher level cognitive skills, planning and organizing, all of this sort of executive skills, and impulse control. And so we would expect maybe that there would be some changes here. And but I this is my focus of research is sort of really on the early years of life. So I probably need to find a friend who can work with teenagers and I'll deal with the toddlers. I I have another kind of speculative question, um, which is to do with children who show sort of neurodivergent tendencies. Um, and like infants and toddlers who show it. I do not know, I'm not a clinician, how young you can diagnose these things or these tendencies are shown, but did those also come up in terms of inhibitory control and how brain regions activate in terms of yeah, FNIRs and things? Yeah, so again, that's such a great question. And it's something that kind of forms a bigger perspective in terms of my research. And so we know that in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder, or ADHD, and that it's quite common that there is some sort of executive kind of differences. And ADHD, there's often difficulties with kind of impulse control stuff. But there can also be some strengths in other areas that you might think are a little bit different than sort of the typical trajectory. So it's really fascinating the kind of executive function profile of children or adults with autism and ADHD. It's often the case that kind of formal diagnoses for these kinds of conditions don't happen until well into primary school. which is again kind of another sort of motivation for my research is that having been in the primary school, seeing some of these differences and difficulties in executive functions play out um and potentially these having kind of neurodiversity aspects, it makes me think, okay, at what point in development can we start to em identify perhaps children who either may later go on to develop m or be diagnosed, sorry, with neurodevelopmental differences or is it the case that there are children who sort of may deviate from a typical trajectory but could later catch up? And so it's one of the questions that's quite important for me in my research is to understand kind of before the child walks into the primary school classroom at age four, is there a way that we can identify children who may need that little bit of extra support in preschool or in the home that actually then and allows them to start at age four with sort of a strength, rather than waiting until they're sort of eight or nine to go on and be, you know, suggested that they need support or have difficulties. Some of the research that, um not that I've done, but that other people have done with infants and young children is to ask for participants from families who have a history of autism or ADHD in the family. Because we know that sort of that sometimes has an increased likelihood that the child may then experience similar things. that kind of research has suggested that if you have a family history, a family connection of autism or ADHD, em we might then be able to sort of see whether those em traits or those differences come forward in infancy and toddlerhood compared to a sample of children who don't have that same history. m And so that kind of puts us in a position where we might be able to say, okay, this is what typical toddlerhood development looks like bearing in mind that that's going to be very different for each child but we can sort of say typically where we might expect to see improvements and then be able to start to identify okay which children maybe fall away from that trajectory and having the power of kind of the FNAs to help us with that and as I said in my results we saw changes in the brain before we saw it in behavior. So having that additional tool might be able to give us some answers sort of earlier than we might be able to do otherwise. And I think that's really important just to enable children to start primary school with those skills that they need for learning. Yeah, that's so funny so it's basically a love at brain before behavior. So there's changes before it kind of the the behavior has chance to kind of catch up. Um so kind of touched on a little bit of individual differences there in terms of like aut autism and ADHD, but I guess babies' brains are all kind of very different as we all are as humans. are there any would you say there's like any factors that influence that development, such as genetics, early experiences? You touched on it little bit, or environments. Is there anything that you know? research shows that kind of like can affect that. Right, so all of those things. It kind of goes back, I guess, to one of the things I mentioned very early on about how we sometimes just focus in on like a particular skill that we're measuring and we kind of uh forget or don't pay as much attention to the context of this child that exists in this world. uh And so we know that there are important differences in brain and behavior development from children who are living in more deprived backgrounds. And so having that kind of socio-economic gap is really substantial and we know, so in education we know that there is something like a two-year gap from when uh the richest and the poorest child, even on that sort of first day of primary school, right, and that sort of gap in educational attainment continues throughout the sort of education that the child will go through and that's really significant. em And we can start to look at that already, right, in um infancy and early childhood to understand, okay, are these gaps driven by socioeconomic status evident, like, already from birth? em Or is it because of kind of factors that come with living in deprived homes, such as like access to resources, sort of differences in language quality? we talked about kind of the role of the parent and sort of the way that they support children in their development by giving them opportunities and sort of demonstrating how to get through things. Those things are all going to be playing huge roles in these socio-economic differences. So it's not just one thing that we can pick, but we know that it is this significant factor. So I know that there's em research that's being done actually comparing different cultures across different countries of the world. kind of like a UK based sample with samples in kind of rural Africa and looking at differences in brain development of young children there. And it does seem like there's some really interesting findings. So this is the work out of the University of Cambridge with Sarah Lloyd Fox. She's kind of compared with FNIRS, the children's brain development in those two contexts. There's lots of different intricate patterns that are different and it'll be interesting to see kind of what happens with that research as those children get older. Yeah, that's fascinating. So all kind of different seems to be so many different kind of bits of research, investigating all different parts, which makes sense. That's how research works. Um uh d just to add to like the cross culture aspect of it, we had Frankie Fongon who does research in Malaysia, children in Malaysia children in Malaysia, Vanuatu and New Zealand and was talking about sort of imitation differences and slightly older kids. So I think it was toddl like not toddlers, three and higher higher up, I think, from our if I remember correctly, but sort of differences in how they perceive imitation and how they imitate people on screen versus in real life and things as well.'Cause uh yeah, that was very fascinating. So I wanted to just point that out. But yeah, sorry, go. that reminds me of a study that one of my colleagues has been involved in comparing children in South Africa with children in Australia looking at executive function skills in preschool children. And the results that came from there were kind of a little bit counterintuitive to what you might expect because actually here they found that the children, the preschool children in South Africa showed enhanced executive function skills. even though they were living in kind of deprived backgrounds compared to the sort of children in Australia who were living in less deprived backgrounds. And that's all a really interesting story because it was actually suggesting that children in South Africa who were living in kind of more deprived areas are having to, they have no choice but to use their executive function skills. They're almost kind of forced to develop them more quickly because of the demands of the environment. And one of the examples of that that I still remember was about these preschool children having to catch this kind of transportation to the preschool and those children were responsible for getting there on time by themselves and so the researcher said she was testing with the children playing the games and some of them were so concerned about when they had to go that they were kind of already thinking about that and so some of those differences I think are impossible to ignore and is something that research in this field in general needs to be more aware of right because The results that I've talked about from my study are maybe true of the children that I tested in my sample in the UK, but may not be true in children in other populations across the world. So we need to make sure we're not sort of just having this biased perspective. Yeah, that's completely fair. I think this might be a good time to 'cause we've gone on to lots of different types of research. if you had I want you to pretend you've got unlimited funding, you've been given a two billion pound grant. Uh the ethical committee um are all on holiday for two weeks. So anything you want's gonna go through. Um, please be sensible with that. what would be your absolute dream study to do? this question and I love the opportunity to kind of put all rules out the window. that's kind of one of the things that came to my mind is do you remember these kinds of programs that they used to show where they like Child of Our Time or something like that where they would kind of follow these same group of children across their life and they would look you know look at them at all different ages when they're going off to school and they would interview them. I just think how much I would love to find a group of children around the world, When, you know, meet their parents, sort of be able to film, you know, their development, when they say their first words, when they're learning to inhibit all of these different things and follow them literally throughout the course of their life, I think would be so fantastic. Just from the kind of case study perspective, right, of really understanding. the different factors that happen in a person's life and how that might change their outcomes. But also having this connected group of children that are going through life at the same time, I think would be really exciting. And in terms of the kind of scientific outcomes from that, I think they would be invaluable because we would be able to really understand and it's maybe the like fourth time I've talked about this now, but we would really be able to understand that holistic child's perspective and their experiences that will help us understand, you know, actually how what has happened to the brain when a child lives in poverty? Or what does happen to the brain when a child grows up in a bilingual household or when they start school? And is that consistent, right, across the different cultures and experiences? So I think that would be incredibly exciting. It would involve lots of international travel, which would be great for me, not so great for the environment. But I just, yeah, I just think that would be so cool. with my FNIRS kit in my backpack like throwing them around. Yeah, so you've got the got the funding. how big is an FNIRS kit in just out of curiosity? Yeah, so most recently developments in the kind of technology for FNIRS have really taken off. Like it is incredible now. When they were sort of first developed, it was like rigged up to like a thing on the ceiling with massive wires and it was huge. But now it is literally something that can go into a backpack. like, and I mean like a child's backpack. So at Lancaster University, I'm part of the Infant and Child Development Lab. And there's a team here who are using a wireless um EFNIR system where the child will wear sort of like the swimming cap like I suggested. All of the wires are sort of short and self-contained on the cap. And then the sort of device is like maybe like a battery pack size. And it just goes in on a sort of child's backpack. It's really lightweight and they can just freely move around whilst their brain activity is being measured. So the technology now is just fantastic and it allows us to do things like if I were to travel around the world these children could wear the kits in their backpack as they go off to school which is just fantastic. Huge kind of advancement in technology there that just is really allowing us to ask questions we couldn't possibly have done before. Z so we we spoke about the dream research project. Coming a little bit back down to earth, what are your like current what is your c what are your current research projects doing and sort of like in your lab and yeah, what's the future hold? Yeah, back down to earth. It's all about toddlerhood for me at the moment, unsurprisingly probably because of kind of where my research left off from my PhD. But what I'm hoping to do, and I've started doing some pilot work at Lancaster with this, is to invite toddlers into the lab to see if I can understand what's happening in their brains during executive function development tasks, such as the iPad task I mentioned before. And I'm doing a little bit of piloting at the moment with that just to understand how the toddlers get on with the FNIRS system and to see whether the task is still suitable, which it is. And what I'm hoping to do is to develop a longitudinal study across toddlerhood. So it might not be around the world and with all these amazing things, but in sort of the lab, I would love to see toddlers at sort of... quite close together age ranges across this period. So I can really start to unpick. So here you asked earlier about like what age would we expect inhibitory control to start really improving. I think the answer is in that sort of toddlerhood period. So maybe from sort of like 18 months to three. And so the research I'm currently in kind of grant writing mode. Please fund me. I really want to work with toddlers and work with their families and try and find that missing puzzle piece about how these executive function skills develop in kind of coherence with the brain during that period of time. And as part of that, I'm developing some new kind of tasks that we hope to be able to use with F &A is to give us a sort of more comprehensive picture of the other executive skills that are developing during that time. I'll get I was just gonna say get Beth to f get Beth on the funding board. She's already willing to give you two billion, so your your mu money will go immediately. of ethics too! ah I I I have one more question, which is you said other executive functioning tasks. We mainly spoke about inhib inhibitory control. What are the sort of other tasks we're talking about when what you're looking at? Yeah, good question. I mean, guess we kind of focus on inhibitory control because that is where my research has focused so far, right? But executive functions is actually like this umbrella term and under the umbrella sits kind of a number of cognitive skills. Typically in research, we focus on this kind of trio of skills, which are inhibitory control, but also working memory and then cognitive flexibility or cognitive shifting. And so working memory is kind of our ability to hold information in our mind and do something with it. An example of this I think of often is kind of like a shopping list, a mental shopping list. Maybe you have three or four things on your shopping list and as you put something in your basket, you then have to kind of update that information in your mind, right? Once you have the milk, you don't need to go and get it again. And then cognitive flexibility or cognitive shifting is about kind of Having a sort of set of rules in your mind about how to approach a task or achieve a goal, but actually being able to adapt and be a bit flexible if something changes in your environment or if the rules of the task slightly change. So having that kind of flexible thinking. And you're probably already thinking like how on earth are you gonna ask toddlers and babies to do those things, right? And it's similar difficulties as I spoke with before, but the way we've kind of approached it is to to try and scale it back and think of, what are the most simplistic versions of those skills that we could expect infants or toddlers to be able to do? So for working memory, one of the tasks that we've been working on with my supervisor is about kind of working with little kind of toy figures. So we present children with maybe two or three little figures. And then we do a little bit of, what is it, sleight of hand where one suddenly disappears inside a box and we wait to see if the child kind of looks for that missing item, right? And we can kind of infer, well, if they look for it, they must've remembered that there was an additional one. uh And then for cognitive flexibility, I'm currently working on developing a task that is based on quite a famous task called the dimensional change card sort task. which is about sorting things into either color or shape. This task is commonly used to assess executive function in older children, normally from three years and up. But it involves quite a heavy language demand. You have to understand what you're being asked, whether you're sorting by color, whether you're sorting by shape. And if you don't have language abilities or ideas of what those categories mean, you're not going to be able to complete that task. So I'm working with some collaborators to kind of try and think of exciting ways to modify that task to be more suitable for toddlers. And one of the things I'm doing is instead of asking children to sort things like on a touchscreen or like m flat cards, what I'm doing is kind of giving them physical objects to sort and hoping that by giving them something tangible where they can physically see the matching colors and stuff. that it becomes a lot more accessible to them and means we might be able to assess flexibility a little bit earlier than we have done before. I don't know if this is going to work. It's one of the things I'm piloting at the moment. But I'm really excited to give it a go and to see what happens. And this, I guess, is part of experimental research, right? We don't know what we're going to get, but it could be really important for the future. The work the working memory task sounds uh so the one where you hide a figure sounds like the object permanent stuff which they used to do, right? I've I've Yeah. So object permanence is about whether an infant would like you're playing with a toy, it's hidden under a cloth or something. Is it that the infant actually searches for it and so they have representation that that object existed? Or is it that once it's covered and out of sight that there was just no representation of that object in the infant's minds? And so we're working in late m infancy, so we would expect that all children at that age would have object permanence around 10 months. And so we're kind of extending that a little bit. So instead of just hiding, you know, just working with one object, we've got two, maybe two or three objects to sort of see if they can remember how many objects to look for. that's kind of a paper that we are, we've pre-printed and hope to be able to publish soon. That's like so many different ways to like measure uh so many different parts of executive function and memory to a certain extent as well. I mean I'm sure we could have probably chat for about six hours about all the different tasks that can be that can be done. Yes, it's, yeah, it's fun. And I guess how how is it working kind of with that? Like obviously working with very young children. what's the most challenging part of doing that? Or do you find it's actually quite simple? So I love it. I enjoy working with families, working with babies and toddlers. However, it is certainly not simple. It is certainly not straightforward. And even if you think you have a good understanding of what you can expect from a toddler, they will do something that you had not considered. So they are unpredictable even when you try to predict them. m And so I think one of the challenges that comes with working with this age group, besides kind of designing suitable tasks and getting them to wear EFNAS caps, is actually their kind of temperament on the day, right? So, and they're sort of, yeah, how well regulated they are. So they could come having just had a really nice nap. They're really excited about being in a new place and they want to play the games with you and they, know, everything goes smoothly. but the next time they visit, maybe they didn't have a great nap, maybe they're hungry, you ask them to try and engage in a task and they refuse or they just want to play with something else and they're sort of no negotiating with a toddler, should we say, or it's very difficult to negotiate with a toddler. And so it's one of the things I think if you don't work in developmental psychology that might be very hard to appreciate because if you have an adult coming to a testing session, most of the time they're going to follow the instructions even if they're very bored. with toddlers if they don't want to do something they will say no or they will leave the room. I was like, Mood, I feel that. like I wish I could do that, but So you have to be flexible, you have to think on your feet a little bit and not care too much if things don't go exactly as you had imagined. Yeah. Fair enough. Uh flipping it around, what's the most fun part of your research? What's the part of your research you've enjoyed the most? So this was, yeah, this question I could give you several different answers to. The first one, I think the most exciting one is particularly in the longitudinal work I've done, right, is being able to share this with the same families across this period of time. And so the families come back again to the lab and you remember the children and the parents and you see how much they've grown and you're excited because you can then look at their data, right, and see like, wow, you know, this child is now able to do this. And being, yeah, having that connection with the families is really, really exciting. And then I think the second part for me is kind of unlocking these puzzle pieces. And I think I have a lot of puzzle pieces still to unlock, but just being able to kind of like start in my research to start to get some information that we didn't have before is really exciting to start to see, okay, like. yeah now we know this but we don't know that so that's like you know starting to build up that that jigsaw puzzle has been really exciting especially as I'm quite a new researcher still and so I feel like I've got yeah lots lots to look forward to. Jaded yet. Yeah, ask me again next year. so I know we've kind of like you've probably touched on it in bits and parts, but um I guess like it was good to just like like nail this down like um what do you hope your research contributes to the field of developmental neuroscience as a whole? Wow. question. um that I hope that I'm contributing something new and I think that I am. I think that I am contributing knowledge that the field, very specific knowledge, that the field hasn't had um in the way that we've been able to give it during this kind of research and I hope that the kind of... keep talking about jigsaw puzzles but I hope that with these jigsaw puzzle pieces when I keep finding these things from my results are actually going to be able to translate into meaningful things for our families, right? I think I've said that kind of is my bigger perspective. My bigger goal is to be able to do something that actually has meaning for the families that we're working with and for preschool educators and early years professionals that actually means that we understand more about how these skills develop and how the brain supports that so that we can then put into place strategies or supports that I'm really sorry, I've got my teams on Do Not Disturb and it's now pinging. But yeah, I hope that I can kind of, I need to, or we as a field need to understand what this development looks like before we can sort of offer um strategies and support to parents. But that's my long-term goal and I hope that's the impact that my research will have. Excellent. That sounds very necessary. Okay, I'll ask have you got your hot take ready? a couple of hot takes. I will I'll ask you, um Abby, what is your hot take? Okay, so one of the things I've been thinking about as my hot take is that, and this sounds obvious, but children are the future. So a lot of research that maybe attracts attention or attracts funding is things about the future. So uh artificial intelligence and new technology advancements and amazing medical advancements. But I want to kind of share that my hot take is that children are the future and it is the children that will go on to be working with artificial intelligence or who will be the future doctors and so investment in infants and early childhood is so essential because they are our future and it's great that technology is moving us forward and we need that but I think often children and education can be neglected in terms of priorities for government and funding and I think we should kind of remember that the children, we're nothing without the children, right, that they are the future guardians of our world and I think that's so important that we kind of do what we can to understand child development and give children the best future possible. Awesome. You said you had multiple. Do you have another as well? So my second one was about the importance of the early years. So it's kind of like, what's that expression about like drumming the same beat? I don't know. It's kind of the same thing. Because a lot of research is done once children are in the primary school. It's about putting in place interventions and support that enables children to perhaps make improvements in primary school. But my hot take is that um actually that's quite late. um And we work with infants and toddlers and early years professionals who would be able to tell you probably already which children in their nursery schools will need additional support. so I'm drumming, yeah, banging the same drum again that investment in infancy and early childhood is so important because it's good. We have those early years are where the rapid brain development happens from zero to five. 90 % of our brain development happening. And so it's such a crucial time for intervention. And so actually, I think once the children are in the primary school, that's actually quite late. So that's my hot take. Controversial, maybe. Children are the future. well I think we can kind of end there. Uh do you have any final things to say, Abby? Or do we end on Children of the Future? Children are the future. oh But no, just to say thank you so much for inviting me, thank you for this great conversation and it's so fun to have the opportunity to talk about my research and my passion so yeah thanks so much. you welcome it was great to have you. it's been very enjoyable. Very enjoyable. A good chat. A good yeah, as we say. Awesome. and yeah. The once again, thank you everybody, if you're still here for listening. and yeah, thanks Beth for coming back on. Hopefully one more episode and then the next time we talk to you, you'll be a doctor. So exciting. gonna be Dr. Bethany Facer That's never go that's that's I'll only be introducing myself as that. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves I might fail. Um and that will be idiot. No, that's not gonna happen. No, it can't happen. No, it can't happen. On that positive note, thank you. Thank you again, Abby. Thanks everybody for listening and until next time. Take care. Bye. Bye.