Transcriber: Sena Gökgöz Reviewer: Emma Gon
I once told my grandmother that I was getting my PhD in holding babies.
To which she replied, “There must be something else that you do.”
My name is Kelly Gunther. I graduated from Penn State
with my PhD in developmental psychology,
and I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at Yale.
I study why kids become anxious.
However, today I want to talk a bit about what we can learn from holding babies.
Papers in psychology include tens to thousands of participants,
each representing a one on one interaction
between an experimenter and an individual.
But when you’re studying development,
the people that come into the lab to participate are infants and children.
Imagine a life of group projects that determine your entire career
where your group mates are all babies.
So this has prompted me to think very deeply
about who is included in research
and what are the samples that inform what we know about the developing brain.
So I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years working nights
and weekends to collect beautiful, brilliant,
perfect data with one of our baby scientists
or get vomited on by a seven year old.
So people might ask, “Wouldn’t this be easier with adults?”
That's an interesting point.
But I've learned so much about child development
and anxiety disorders through my work.
Yet I’ve learned just as much about humans
by working with the families that participate in research.
Behind every data point is a person we must work to get to know
the people that inform our research just as much
as we must work to specialize in the brain or behavior.
So rather than expecting a child to do a task
that we think will answer our research question,
we must design a task to fit our participants.
So, for example, say we’re studying memory.
With adults it’s rather straightforward just to present them with some information
and ask them what do they remember?
The first school age child perhaps will make a computer game
where they learn about different aliens
and what planets they live on.
Then later they’ll be asked to match aliens with their home planets
by pressing buttons on a computer.
The speed at which they reply tells us
information about how well they remember that alien.
And maybe we’ll also collect some brain data while they do the task
to examine what parts of the brain are working harder for different kids
to understand why some kids might do better on the game than others.
But a baby can’t really tell us what they remember,
and they certainly can’t press a button to give us their answer.
So we have to trick infants into showing us what they know.
So we might do something like show a baby
different pictures on a computer screen.
We'll use something called an eye tracker,
which is basically a fancy camera that tells us
where they’re looking on the screen.
And then we’ll use information about what a baby looks at,
more or less to tell us what it is that they remember and what they don't.
Now, this might come as a surprise, but despite our best efforts,
infants and children do not always follow directions.
So we'll often wildly overestimate
the number of families that have to walk through the doors of a lab
just to complete a study.
And even still, data collection includes multiple bathroom breaks,
negotiating with goldfish,
or taking some time to sit on the floor
and discuss our favorite colors and dinosaurs,
just to get through a study.
So I’ve thought just as much about what [inaudible] video to play for a baby,
as much as I have about the brain circuits that might put
an individual at elevated risk for anxiety disorder.
I find this humbling!
And so if we want to hear the voice of children
and understand their development, that needs to be all children.
Historically, in the social sciences,
there has been a focus on populations that will refer to as WEIRD.
This stands for white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.
So that means that the majority of research in children
is actually centered upon the minority of the world’s population.
So why is this a problem?
Not all babies are the same.
They may grow up in different homes with different resources
and in different families.
And the environments that we grow up in and live in
have a lot to do with how our brains develop.
So babies from different environments may have slightly different brains.
And studying one child certainly does not apply to all children.
Also, research traditionally focuses on the communities
surrounding universities due to convenience,
which represents a privileged subset of the population.
These are families that may work at the university
or be familiar with research.
So how can we fix this?
First, we can build community partnerships to reach outside of the area,
immediately surrounding the university
and ask families what is it that you need
to feel comfortable participating in research.
As we work to engage families that aren’t necessarily university affiliated,
it may be their first time in a lab or on a college campus.
So they may have woken up their child from a nap,
put them in a car seat, driven to a new location.
All of them have to make small talk with a stranger
and then have their child look at pictures of aliens on a computer screen.
This is a big day for anybody.
And so we as researchers must adapt to meet children
and families at their level of comfort
and understanding rather than expecting them to rise to ours.
For instance, it's scary to see technology that you've never seen before,
especially if someone told you that it’s measuring your brain.
For example, we might use an EEG cap to measure brain activity on your scalp,
but that kind of looks like
we’re covering your head with 100 tiny suction cups.
And then if we use an MRI to take a picture of your brain,
if you've ever had an MRI at the doctors,
you might remember that they’re pretty large and noisy.
On top of that, we’ll ask a child or infant
to sit still while all this is happening. No, thank you.
With all of this happening, our goal is
to make people feel safe, heard and understood.
We can empower families to ask questions,
but also give them answers that are accessible and understandable.
Also, the child is always the boss.
If at any point they’re not having a good time, then data collection ends.
Additionally, just as diversity is important in film and politics,
it's critical to have diversity in researchers.
That means having research staff who have shared identities
and experiences with families.
This allows us to do things like conduct research in the family's native language,
which is so important in making individuals feel comfortable.
It's also important for children to see scientists that look like them.
Opening the doors for the careers that they can dream of and aspire to.
Adapting research to the children and their families
who participate is not only out of respect,
but it’s also in the name of scientific rigor and validity
If people don't feel comfortable in a lab setting,
they may modify their behavior.
So the data we’re collecting might not actually be accurately
representing them at all.
And having tasks that an individual can relate to
may actually change our findings.
Where a lot of work traditionally finds that children
who have experienced adversity will score lower
on various cognitive tasks than their non adversity exposed peers,
a recent paper by young and colleagues in 2022
found that this performance gap actually closes
when the items used in a task are relatable like people
or money rather than abstract like shapes.
So there’s a danger of misrepresenting developmental phenomena
as a function of the tasks that we use with individuals in our lab.
I was drawn to developmental research
because it felt like a way that I could make a positive change
for every member of society, even the little ones.
Research has the ability to inform so many proposed policy items
with the potential to enrich child development
and make sure that children grow up into happy and healthy adults.
These are policies like paid maternal leave,
humane policies for immigrant families, affordable health care,
access to education and support for mental health
that can improve so many lives.
However, with non-representative samples
and disconnected tasks that are often used in research,
we are oftentimes neglecting the people that may benefit
the most from some of these policies.
That’s why it’s critical to get to know participants as people.
We can ask families and children about their daily lives
and how they feel coming into the lab.
We can then use what we learn going forward in our careers
and represent children and families and research and in turn, in policy.
As scientists, we have to remember that every data point in a paper
is a child and a family with their own lives,
their own fears and concerns and their own favorite dinosaurs.
And constantly remind ourselves of this
as we do research to build a better world for children.
Thank you.