Monica E. Ellwood-Lowe

In an ongoing study, we are examining whether structural volatility associated with the COVID-19 pandemic affects parents' speech to their children. Does parents' speech with their children change as a function of their mood or their worries; their job security, day-to-day responsibilities, or feeling of safety in their home; even national events like human rights protests, elections, or numbers of COVID cases? By collecting repeated samples from young children's early environments over this period of time, we can ask what matters for one individual family, independent of other families. You can learn more about the study in our blog, here.

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How do we understand "optimal" brain development?

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For many years, the study of human brain development has relied on children whose parents have been willing and able to bring them into a university and allow stranger-researchers to measure their brain function or structure. (If you have ever been in an MRI scanner, you know that they are not un-intimidating metal tubes that make weird, often quite loud noises.) The result? Most of our understanding of brain development came from children whose parents were relatively wealthy and highly educated and typically white and lived near universities and trusted researchers and had some extra time to spend in a lab. In other words, not the "typical" human population.

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As researchers have come to recognize this problem, we've made great strides in recruiting more representative samples. However, we run into problems when we try to compare children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds against these previously established developmental "norms." In my research, I ask what is adaptive for whom and under what circumstances.

 

Using a study of 10,000 children across the United States, we have found that patterns of brain function that are cognitively adaptive for children whose families are living below poverty are not the same as those that have been established in the prior literature. You can read an open access version of our findings here. We've recently followed up to track how these children are doing one and two years later, and found that this dissociation between what's adaptive for children above and below poverty holds up over time (read the published version of the follow-up here). We think this might point to children in poverty having to overcome very different sets of structural barriers in order to perform highly on cognitive tests and in school.

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To what extent do children develop skills suited to the demands of their environments?​​

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While it is relatively easy to study how children perform on canonical tests of executive function and reasoning, these are tests of cognitive skills that have typically been designed by researchers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, based on a particular set of values and expectations. They are neither the only cognitive skills available to children nor the only skills necessary to thrive in the world.

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In my research, I am interested in understanding the other skills available to children. For example, do children whose environments consist of more overheard speech (e.g., speech to parents or siblings) than speech directed to them (e.g., caregiver directly talking to child) develop superior abilities to learn from overheard speech? Do children in these environments develop more broad attention skills, such that they are able to learn information from multiple sources of information at once? We are asking these questions in ongoing studies, which you can read more about here.

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