Editorial perspective: Leaving the baby in the bathwater in neurodevelopmental research

Abstract

Neurodevelopmental conditions are characterised by differences in the way children interact with the people and environments around them. Despite extensive investigation, attempts to uncover the brain mechanisms that underpin neurodevelopmental conditions have yet to yield any translatable insights. We contend that one key reason is that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists study brain function by taking children away from their environment, into a controlled lab setting. Here, we discuss recent research that has aimed to take a different approach, moving away from experimental control through isolation and stimulus manipulation, and towards approaches that embrace the measurement and targeted interrogation of naturalistic, user‐defined and complex, multivariate datasets. We review three worked examples (of stress processing, early activity level in ADHD and social brain development in autism) to illustrate how these new approaches might lead to new conceptual and translatable insights into neurodevelopment.

Similar social attention, physiological arousal, and familiarity effect in autistic and neurotypical children: A real-life recreational eye-tracking paradigm.

“…To conclude, our study clearly shows that more naturalistic research should be carried out in order to better delineate and understand the specificities of social functioning in children, and to provide autistic individuals with adequate support (see Wass & Jones, 2023 for a recent plea in this direction). Our naturalistic, live paradigm holds substantial implications for the broader understanding of social attention in neurodiverse populations, highlighting the crucial role of social context, and, more particularly, of the task participants are engaged in and the familiarity between interactional partners, in studying social attention.…”

Current perspectives on perinatal mental health and neurobehavioral development: focus on regulation, coregulation and self-regulation

“…It is more feasible to study regulation problems in infants and toddlers and more work is necessary on the characterization, detection and understanding of (self-)regulation problems and their precursors. Quantifying micro self- and coregulation dynamics within a biobehavioral synchrony framework remains a challenge [36 ▪▪ ,180,181] (see at “Implications for mental health”).…”

“…Notably, real-life measurement in the home context (with infant-adapted wearables) is possible [165]. These realistic recordings may be more reliable (especially to study parent-infant interaction when regulation problems are emerging) than in an artificial lab situation [180,181,218]. Research is ongoing and progress is being made in complex behavioral data analysis [219].…”

The neural and physiological substrates of real-world attention change across development.

“…How children allocate their attention in experimenter-controlled, screen-based lab tasks differs, however, from actual real-world attention in several ways (32)(33)(34). For example, the real-world is interactive and manipulable, and so how we interact with the world determines what information we, in turn, receive from it: experiences generate behaviours (35).…”