Methods in developmental Flashcards
(28 cards)
1
Q
what are the developmental research designs?
A
- Cross-sectional
- Groups of children of different ages are studied at the same time using age appropriate measures
- Longitudinal
- The same group of children is studied at multiple time points: repeated (but age appropriate) measures
2
Q
what are the methods?
A
- Procedure allowing to capture a psychological
phenomenon - Observe
- Do an experiment
- Survey
3
Q
what are the measures?
A
- Specific quantity, quality, extent, or dimension of a psychological construct
- Gives us DATA
- Academic attainment
- Happiness
- Curiosity
- Stress level
4
Q
what are the common methods and measures in developmental psychology?
A
- Naturalistic and semi-naturalistic observation: field, home, laboratory
- Parental questionnaires
- Self-report: e.g., diary, vignettes, interview
- Structured tasks/performance-based measures
- Behavioural experiments, including using special technology, e.g., eye tracking, web-based
- Physiological measures: pupillometry, heart rate, skin conductance response, motion detection, electromyography, etc.
- Neuroimaging measures: EEG, MEG, fNIRS, fMRI
- Computational modelling
5
Q
what difference between involuntary vs voluntary actions?
A
- involuntary
- Brain activation
- Physiological response
- Head turns and body orientation
- Emotional reactions
- Latency in response/behavioural inhibition
- Reaction time
- Blinks
- voluntary
- Preferential choices: reaching, grasping, crawling towards objects
- Pointing to objects
- Social referencing
- Show-and-give
- Exploration & Play
6
Q
how do you choose a method?
A
- The right method for the right research question, at the right time, for the right participant
- Infants at risk for autism
- Social behaviours: attention to social stimuli, face recognition, eye-contact, gaze following, joint attention
- Restrictive and repetitive behaviours
7
Q
how do you screen for autism in adults?
A
- Mind in the Eyes Test
- Mapping emotion/mental state words to facial expressions in the eyes
- Measure of ‘mentalizing’
- Relies on mental state lexicon
8
Q
how do you screen for autism in older children?
A
- Theory of mind: ability to mentalise/take into account the beliefs of others
- Based on the false belief test
- Typically passed by children at the age of 3-4
9
Q
how do you screen for autism in toddlers?
A
- Quantitative Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (Q-CHAT)
10
Q
Why early screening for autism?
A
- Earlier detection, before presence of typically emerging behaviours in 2nd year of life
- Overt, behavioural signs do not typically manifest earlier
- It is assumed that early, before full emergence of symptoms, intervention leads to better outcomes
- Improvement of quality of life – for the individual, the family and the community
- Recruiting siblings of children diagnosed with ASD – termed “infants at risk of autism” as a way to detect early signs – behavioural or biological markers
11
Q
what are the developmental cascades in autism?
A
- View: primary neural impairments that lead to ASD are transitory – must be detected during critical developmental periods (before 2nd year of life)
- Core behavioural features of autism are malleable due to neuroplasticity
- Cascading effects: early perturbation eventually derails development of social cognition
12
Q
what are the behavioural markers of autism in infancy?
A
- ‘Very good babies’
- May not show interest in people
- Atypical eye contact
- Fail to respond when their name is called, despite having good hearing
- Fail to show or are delayed in joint attention
- No or little reciprocal ‘proto-conversation’/babbling
- Difficulty interpreting nonverbal communication
- Language regression (words disappear) and/or stasis of language and social behaviour, usually in the second year of life
13
Q
what is the Preferential looking paradigm?
A
- The visual interest test (Fantz, 1961): do infants perceive and differentiate among distinctive forms?
- “looking chamber”
- through a peephole in the ceiling experimenters could see tiny images of the objects mirrored in the infant’s eyes
- time infant spends looking at each object recorded with a timer
- Infants preferred the real face, looked a bit less at the scrambled face and ignored the control pattern
14
Q
what is the Habituation and violation of expectation paradigms?
A
- Infants prefer novelty (Fantz, 1964):
- Showed pairs of stimuli simultaneously: one remained constant, one changed across trials
- Found decreasing fixation to the familiar pattern and increasing fixation to the novel pattern
- Habituation: make infants habituated (‘bored’) to one stimulus and then pair it with another, novel stimuli; should the infant look more at the new
stimulus, then they have discriminated the two stimuli from each other. - Violation of Expectation: looking time indexing surprise – e.g., impossible events
15
Q
what is the No novelty preference in autism?
A
- Measured children’s (3-4 years) duration of looking
in response to a repeating stimulus and a novel
stimulus presented side by side across multiple trials - Participants in the typical developing group and the
Williams Syndrome group decreased their attention toward the repeating stimulus and increased their attention to the novel stimulus over time. - Participants in the ASD group showed no novelty
preference – instead, a similar attentional response to the novel and repeating stimuli.
16
Q
what is the Modern use of preferential
looking paradigm?
A
- Use of video camera(s)
- Eye-tracking, including head-mounted
- Stimuli presented on screen or as live objects
- Use of language along with perceptual stimuli
- Babies stay with caregiver
- Caregiver shouldn’t interfere with the study or bias the baby
17
Q
what is the use of Eye-tracking?
A
- Uses infrared light to measure where the participant is looking at the screen at any moment
- Fixations and saccades
- Allows precise measurement of looking times and fixations
- Allows to investigate which part of an image infants are more interested in
- Time course analysis
18
Q
what are Eye-tracking AOIs?
A
- Defined area of interests (AOIs)
- First fixation
- Cumulative fixation within a time-period
- Sequence analysis
19
Q
what is the link between Autism early screening & attention to eyes?
A
- Longitudinal fine-grained measures: 10 time points
- Attention to eyes is present but in decline in 2–6-month-olds later diagnosed with ASD
20
Q
what is Head-mounted eye-tracking?
A
- Combines head camera and eye camera
- Eye-gaze can be tracked in real-life environments
- Allows to investigate interactions with objects and people
21
Q
what is the link between gaze-contingent eye-tracker
& responses to faces?
A
- Interactive gaze-contingent faces in a novel and naturalistic eye-tracking paradigm
- 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants: preference for looking at the eyes relative to the mouth
- but not in sample of infants at-risk for autism
22
Q
what is the Caution and critique of looking times measures?
A
- What is the operational definition of a look?
- Assumption that the cognitive organisation of infants corresponds to that of adults
- Active information processing vs blank stare?
23
Q
what are the Other looking measures?
A
- Cumulative looking: just like preferential looking, except stimuli are shown sequentially
- Latency to look
- Looking away: index of loss of interest
- Duration of look (length of fixation)
- Anticipatory looks
- Social referencing: looking at someone to gain information
- Pupil dilation (via eye-tracking)
- Blinking rate
24
Q
what are the Neuroimaging
methods?
A
- Haemodynamic response (brain blood supply)
- fNIRS (functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy)
Electrophysiological response (electromagnetic fields generated in the brain) - EEG (Electroencephalography)
- ERPs (Event-related potentials)
- fNIRS (functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy)
25
what is the use of the Functional MRI in autism research?
* Tested 5–12-year-old children diagnosed with autism
* Stimuli: stories that described characters' mental
states (Mental), non-mentalistic social information
(Social), and causal events in the environment
(Physical)
* Brain regions involved in ToM: TPJ, PC, MPFC
* Responses in TPJ disrupted in children with ASD
26
what is the use of fNRIS in early screening of autism?
* Review of 30 infant studies
* Multiple tasks (e.g., face processing, joint attention and working memory)
* Also measured functional organization in resting-state
* Findings: atypical brain activation in the prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, middle and superior temporal gyrus
+ altered functional connectivity, suggesting an inefficient information transfer between brain regions
27
what is the use of EEG in early screening in autism?
* Raw EEG signal acquisition at resting state
* Longitudinal design: 3-36 months
* Identified data-driven digital biomarkers
- Findings:
* Highly accurate prediction of diagnosis from 3 months;
* Accurate prediction of severity scores – spectrum sensitivity.
28
Towards converging evidence?
- Issues: small samples, single measure, single age group, single time point
- Multiple outcome measures increase rigor and accuracy of interpretations of data
- Converging measures to examine developmental mechanisms in depth and breadth
