Development of Neocortical and Vagal Function in Self-Regulation

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate how nervous system coordination between brain and heart activity regulates thoughts, emotions and behaviors across a period of rapid development (3-to-5-years) and across a wide range of family socioeconomic contexts. Self-regulation is a key aspect of typical and atypical cognitive and social-emotional development. The project will advance basic knowledge about how the brain's frontal lobe develops to more effectively and efficiently regulate cardiac activity, and how this brain-heart coordination influences developmental improvements in self-regulation. As part of this effort, the project will test several foundational theories and establish novel brain imaging methods that will benefit developmental cognitive neuroscience and physiology research. Evidence of how brain and heart systems coordinate their functioning will move the field of research on early developing self-regulation toward a more integrated systems perspective. The project team will collaborate with local schools to (1)provide hands-on experiences involving tasks and games that assess brain and heart functioning, and (2)inform students how the nervous and cardiovascular systems work together to influence their learning. The team also will conduct professional development workshops on these topics with school personnel, to translate research results into teaching practices. More broadly, the results of the project will contribute to basic and practical knowledge about preschoolers' development that can be applied by early childhood educators and policymakers, to improve child development outcomes across the United States. Polyvagal and Neurovisceral Integration theories predict developmental changes in the coordination or integration of neural and cardiovascular factors that are essential to effective self-regulation. To test these theories, prior research has identified key developmental patterns and predictors in early childhood, but that work has generally focused on brain and cardiac factors separately rather than simultaneously. Therefore, this project will address gaps in knowledge about developmental changes in the associations between brain activity and heart rate variability (a key indicator of cardiac regulation), along with measures of cognitive and emotion regulation behaviors in early childhood. The study participants will be 200 children from an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse community that includes urban, suburban and rural settings. A cross-sectional design will involve comparing 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds. Children will visit the laboratory to complete cognitive and emotion regulation tasks, while neural and cardiac activity (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy [fNIRS] and electrocardiogram [ECG]) are both recorded. The study will identify how neural, cardiac, and behavioral indicators of self-regulation co-develop from 3-to-5-years of age. The project team hypothesizes that children with more advanced self-regulation skills will show stronger activation in specified frontal lobe brain regions as well as higher heart rate variability. In addition, the team hypothesizes that neural, cardiac and behavioral self-regulation indicators will show either stronger associations (developmental integration), or weaker associations (developmental specialization), at older versus younger ages due to developmental changes. To test the hypotheses, the data will be analyzed using multivariate general linear and structural equation modeling. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.