Investigating solitude as a tool for downregulation of daily arousal using ecological momentary assessments.

OBJECTIVE: This research explored arousal levels as a motivating factor for solitude-seeking. We hypothesized that solitude becomes more desirable when high-arousal emotions were heightened and individual differences in extraversion and neuroticism would moderate this pattern. METHOD: We tracked individuals' hourly experiences throughout a day. We assessed their high-arousal positive (e.g., excitement) and negative emotions (e.g., tension), whether they were alone or with others, and their preferred situation at the time of the signal. We gathered 4338 surveys from 362 participants, with 103 participants completing all hourly surveys. RESULTS: Preference for and incidence of solitude changed throughout the day. Contrary to our hypotheses, lagged analyses did not indicate high-arousal emotions predicting reports of being alone an hour later. However, individuals were more likely to express a preference for solitude while experiencing high-arousal negative emotions, and less so while experiencing positive emotions. Younger individuals display stronger preference for solitude during experiences of high-arousal negative emotions. Extraversion and neuroticism did not moderate these patterns. CONCLUSIONS: The results highlight the distinctive appeal of solitude as a space for young adults to deal with negative emotions. We discussed how these findings are connected to existing literature and implications for future research.

Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks.

Stunting is associated with poor long-term cognitive, academic and economic outcomes, yet the mechanisms through which stunting impacts cognition in early development remain unknown. In a first-ever neuroimaging study conducted on infants from rural India, we demonstrate that stunting impacts a critical, early-developing cognitive system-visual working memory. Stunted infants showed poor visual working memory performance and were easily distractible. Poor performance was associated with reduced engagement of the left anterior intraparietal sulcus, a region involved in visual working memory maintenance and greater suppression in the right temporoparietal junction, a region involved in attentional shifting. When assessed one year later, stunted infants had lower problem-solving scores, while infants of normal height with greater left anterior intraparietal sulcus activation showed higher problem-solving scores. Finally, short-for-age infants with poor physical growth indices but good visual working memory performance showed more positive outcomes suggesting that intervention efforts should focus on improving working memory and reducing distractibility in infancy.

Colour perception changes with basic colour word comprehension.

Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here we present two novel paradigms in which 12- and 19-month-old participants learning English as their first language were assessed on their perception of colour, while data on their colour word comprehension were also collected. Results indicate that participants' perception of colours close to the colour category boundaries dramatically change after colour word learning. The results highlight the shift made from infant colour categories to adult-like linguistically mediated colour categories that accompanies colour word learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We aimed to test whether colour perception is linguistically mediated in infants. We used novel eye-tracking and pupillometry paradigms to test infant colour perception either side of learning colour words. Infants' discrimination of colour changes after learning colour words, suggesting a shift due to colour word learning. A shift from pre-linguistic colour representation to linguistically mediated colour representation is discussed.

Language Exposure and Brain Myelination in Early Development.

The language environment to which children are exposed has an impact on later language abilities as well as on brain development; however, it is unclear how early such impacts emerge. This study investigates the effects of children's early language environment and socioeconomic status (SES) on brain structure in infancy at 6 and 30 months of age (both sexes included). We used magnetic resonance imaging to quantify concentrations of myelin in specific fiber tracts in the brain. Our central question was whether Language Environment Analysis (LENA) measures from in-home recording devices and SES measures of maternal education predicted myelin concentrations over the course of development. Results indicate that 30-month-old children exposed to larger amounts of in-home adult input showed more myelination in the white matter tracts most associated with language. Right hemisphere regions also show an association with SES, with older children from more highly educated mothers and exposed to more adult input, showing greater myelin concentrations in language-related areas. We discuss these results in relation to the current literature and implications for future research.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT This is the first study to look at how brain myelination is impacted by language input and socioeconomic status early in development. We find robust relationships of both factors in language-related brain areas at 30 months of age.

Poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life: A longitudinal investigation.

Background: Poor air quality has been linked to cognitive deficits in children, but this relationship has not been examined in the first year of life when brain growth is at its peak. Methods: We measured in-home air quality focusing on particulate matter with diameter of <2.5 µm (PM2.5) and infants' cognition longitudinally in a sample of families from rural India. Results: Air quality was poorer in homes that used solid cooking materials. Infants from homes with poorer air quality showed lower visual working memory scores at 6 and 9 months of age and slower visual processing speed from 6 to 21 months when controlling for family socio-economic status. Conclusions: Thus, poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life, consistent with animal studies of early brain development. We demonstrate for the first time an association between air quality and cognition in the first year of life using direct measures of in-home air quality and looking-based measures of cognition. Because indoor air quality was linked to cooking materials in the home, our findings suggest that efforts to reduce cooking emissions should be a key target for intervention. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant OPP1164153.

Vocabulary and automatic attention: The relation between novel words and gaze dynamics in noun generalization.

Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical issue of how novel words and visual attention interact to support word learning we coded frame-by-frame the gaze of 17- to 31-month-old children (n = 66, 38 females) while generalizing novel nouns. We replicate prior findings of more attention to shape when generalizing novel nouns, and a relation to vocabulary development. However, we also find that following a naming event, children who produce fewer nouns take longer to look at the objects they eventually select and make more transitions between objects before making a generalization decision. Children who produce more nouns look to the objects they eventually select more quickly following the naming event and make fewer looking transitions. We discuss these findings in the context of prior proposals regarding children's few-shot category learning, and a developmental cascade of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and word-learning processes that may operate in cases of both typical development and language delay. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Examined how novel words guide visual attention by coding frame-by-frame where children look when asked to generalize novel names. Gaze patterns differed with vocabulary size: children with smaller vocabularies attended to generalization targets more slowly and did more comparison than those with larger vocabularies. Demonstrates a relationship between vocabulary size and attention to object properties during naming. This work has implications for looking-based tests of early cognition, and our understanding of children's few-shot category learning.

A study of UK household wealth through empirical analysis and a non-linear Kesten process.

We study the wealth distribution of UK households through a detailed analysis of data from wealth surveys and rich lists, and propose a non-linear Kesten process to model the dynamics of household wealth. The main features of our model are that we focus on wealth growth and disregard exchange, and that the rate of return on wealth is increasing with wealth. The linear case with wealth-independent return rate has been well studied, leading to a log-normal wealth distribution in the long time limit which is essentially independent of initial conditions. We find through theoretical analysis and simulations that the non-linearity in our model leads to more realistic power-law tails, and can explain an apparent two-tailed structure in the empirical wealth distribution of the UK and other countries. Other realistic features of our model include an increase in inequality over time, and a stronger dependence on initial conditions compared to linear models.

Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model.

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

Frontotemporal activation differs between perception of simulated cochlear implant speech and speech in background noise: An image-based fNIRS study.

In this study we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate neural responses in normal-hearing adults as a function of speech recognition accuracy, intelligibility of the speech stimulus, and the manner in which speech is distorted. Participants listened to sentences and reported aloud what they heard. Speech quality was distorted artificially by vocoding (simulated cochlear implant speech) or naturally by adding background noise. Each type of distortion included high and low-intelligibility conditions. Sentences in quiet were used as baseline comparison. fNIRS data were analyzed using a newly developed image reconstruction approach. First, elevated cortical responses in the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) were associated with speech recognition during the low-intelligibility conditions. Second, activation in the MTG was associated with recognition of vocoded speech with low intelligibility, whereas MFG activity was largely driven by recognition of speech in background noise, suggesting that the cortical response varies as a function of distortion type. Lastly, an accuracy effect in the MFG demonstrated significantly higher activation during correct perception relative to incorrect perception of speech. These results suggest that normal-hearing adults (i.e., untrained listeners of vocoded stimuli) do not exploit the same attentional mechanisms of the frontal cortex used to resolve naturally degraded speech and may instead rely on segmental and phonetic analyses in the temporal lobe to discriminate vocoded speech.

The development of contour processing abilities in the second year.

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that demonstrate the use of pseudoisochromatic plates in testing infants for color vision, we investigated the perceptual contouring abilities required to pass a color-vision test of this type. A total of 115 (51 female) 16- and 19-month-old U.K.-based participants from the Oxfordshire region participated in this study. The evidence collected in this study indicated their ability to systematically fixate a contoured target, but the speed at which they did so was much slower in the younger age group. These findings suggest that the perceptual contouring abilities implicated in this study are still under development in the second year of life, and as such, the results suggest a lower age limit for color-vision tests displayed in this format. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Processing pipeline for image reconstructed fNIRS analysis using both MRI templates and individual anatomy.

Significance: Image reconstruction of fNIRS data is a useful technique for transforming channel-based fNIRS into a volumetric representation and managing spatial variance based on optode location. We present an innovative integrated pipeline for image reconstruction of fNIRS data using either MRI templates or individual anatomy. Aim: We demonstrate a pipeline with accompanying code to allow users to clean and prepare optode location information, prepare and standardize individual anatomical images, create the light model, run the 3D image reconstruction, and analyze data in group space. Approach: We synthesize a combination of new and existing software packages to create a complete pipeline, from raw data to analysis. Results: This pipeline has been tested using both templates and individual anatomy, and on data from different fNIRS data collection systems. We show high temporal correlations between channel-based and image-based fNIRS data. In addition, we demonstrate the reliability of this pipeline with a sample dataset that included 74 children as part of a longitudinal study taking place in Scotland. We demonstrate good correspondence between data in channel space and image reconstructed data. Conclusions: The pipeline presented here makes a unique contribution by integrating multiple tools to assemble a complete pipeline for image reconstruction in fNIRS. We highlight further issues that may be of interest to future software developers in the field.

The functional brain networks that underlie visual working memory in the first two years of life.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a central cognitive system used to compare views of the world and detect changes in the local environment. This system undergoes dramatic development in the first two years; however, we know relatively little about the functional organization of VWM at the level of the brain. Here, we used image-based functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to test four hypotheses about the spatial organization of the VWM network in early development. Four-month-olds, 1-year-olds, and 2-year-olds completed a VWM task while we recorded neural activity from 19 cortical regions-of-interest identified from a meta-analysis of the adult fMRI literature on VWM. Results showed significant task-specific functional activation near 6 of 19 ROIs, revealing spatial consistency in the brain regions activated in our study and brain regions identified to be part of the VWM network in adult fMRI studies. Working memory related activation was centered on bilateral anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS), left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and left ventral occipital complex (VOC), while visual exploratory measures were associated with activation in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left TPJ, and bilateral IPS. Results show that a distributed brain network underlies functional changes in VWM in infancy, revealing new insights into the neural mechanisms that support infants' improved ability to remember visual information and to detect changes in an on-going visual stream.

Linguistic and Cultural Variation in Early Color Word Learning.

When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of color words is similar in related languages. This study also demonstrates that frequency and syllabic complexity can be used to predict variability in infant color word learning across languages. In light of recent evidence indicating that color categories have universal biological foundations, these findings suggest that infants' experience and linguistic exposure drive their shift to culturally and linguistically mediated adult-like understandings of color words.

The role of colour labels in mediating toddler visual attention.

Toddlers, children and adults will spontaneously attend to a semantically- or perceptually-related object when a named target is absent from the visual scene: Upon hearing "strawberry", they will orient to a red plate rather than a yellow one. We examine the role that knowledge of feature labels plays in mediating visual attention to unnamed features. For example, does knowing the word "red", facilitate attending to red objects, though the label is not uttered? We show that toddlers systematically fixate a colour-related object, if and only if they know the name of the colour associated with the named object and the perceptually-related object. These findings suggest that knowledge of perceptual feature labels can play a central role in highlighting salient similarities between objects, both present and absent in the toddler's visual field. We discuss the implications and limitations of these findings beyond the realm of recognition of colour similarities between objects.

Infants show early comprehension of basic color words.

Previous research has highlighted the difficulty that infants have in learning to use color words. Even after acquiring the words themselves, infants are reported to use them incorrectly, or overextend their usage. We tested 146 infants from 5 different age groups on their knowledge of 6 basic color words, red, green, yellow, blue, black, and white, using an intermodal preferential looking task. The results showed that infants show reliable comprehension of color words as early as 19 months of age. No order of acquisition effects were observed. In addition, infants' behavior in the task was facilitated by the provision of redundant noun information, "Look at the red car," and even general referential noun phrases, "Look at the red one," with greater looking to the target than when the color label was not presented in adjective position, "Look, red." The findings indicate that color words may be learned with greater ease than previously thought, verifying recent parental reports showing similar findings. The findings also suggest that 19 month olds have already developed an expectation that color labels should occur in adjectival position. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Scaling-up of a novel, simplified MFC stack based on a self-stratifying urine column.

BACKGROUND: The microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a technology in which microorganisms employ an electrode (anode) as a solid electron acceptor for anaerobic respiration. This results in direct transformation of chemical energy into electrical energy, which in essence, renders organic wastewater into fuel. Amongst the various types of organic waste, urine is particularly interesting since it is the source of 75 % of the nitrogen present in domestic wastewater despite only accounting for 1 % of the total volume. However, there is a persistent problem for efficient MFC scale-up, since the higher the surface area of electrode to volume ratio, the higher the volumetric power density. Hence, to reach usable power levels for practical applications, a plurality of MFC units could be connected together to produce higher voltage and current outputs; this can be done by combinations of series/parallel connections implemented both horizontally and vertically as a stack. This plurality implies that the units have a simple design for the whole system to be cost-effective. The goal of this work was to address the built configuration of these multiple MFCs into stacks used for treating human urine. RESULTS: We report a novel, membraneless stack design using ceramic plates, with fully submerged anodes and partially submerged cathodes in the same urine solution. The cathodes covered the top of each ceramic plate whilst the anodes, were on the lower half of each plate, and this would constitute a module. The MFC elements within each module (anode, ceramic, and cathode) were connected in parallel, and the different modules connected in series. This allowed for the self-stratification of the collective environment (urine column) under the natural activity of the microbial consortia thriving in the system. Two different module sizes were investigated, where one module (or box) had a footprint of 900 mL and a larger module (or box) had a footprint of 5000 mL. This scaling-up increased power but did not negatively affect power density (≈12 W/m(3)), a factor that has proven to be an obstacle in previous studies. CONCLUSION: The scaling-up approach, with limited power-density losses, was achieved by maintaining a plurality of microenvironments within the module, and resulted in a simple and robust system fuelled by urine. This scaling-up approach, within the tested range, was successful in converting chemical energy in urine into electricity.