The early development of predictive processing: new approaches to understanding the neural pathways through which unpredictable caregiver behaviours a

每年，英格兰的国家资助学校都会得到大约20亿英镑的额外资金，目的是缩小儿童长期存在的成绩差距(《学生优等奖》，罗伯茨，2022年)。混乱和不可预测的家庭环境以噪音的意外波动、不稳定的照看行为和日常活动中缺乏结构为特征，与儿童的一系列不利的学业、心理健康和行为后果有关(Marsh，Dobson和Maddison，2020)。然而，这种不利的环境如何影响大脑发育，以及涉及的潜在计算机制在很大程度上仍然是未知的。在我们了解这一点之前，我们不能开始设计改善学习和心理健康结果的干预措施，这对帮助保护弱势儿童至关重要。儿童的早期家庭环境可以通过一系列不同的方式或多或少地进行预测(Evans&Wachs2010)。在这项提案中，我将重点关注可预测性的一个方面，即照顾者的反应能力。婴儿期和蹒跚学步被描述为照顾者投入的敏感期(Gee和Cohodes，2021)。这些输入包括照顾者对儿童早期情感表现(微笑等积极情感的表达(Murray等人，2016)和哭泣等负面情感(Wass等人，2019))反应的可预测性，以及照顾者在支持婴儿与周围世界早期互动方面的敏感性(例如，他们有多偶然地遵循儿童的注意模式)(Mason等人，2019年)。在考虑了协变量后，在第一年接触到来自母亲的不可预测的、零散的信号的儿童在以后的生活中在一系列认知结果上表现得更差(Glynn和Baram，2019年)。具体证明，照顾者的责任感可以防止家庭混乱对长期结果的不利影响(Vernon-Feagans等人，2016年)。这种可预测性的生物学嵌入，以及文献中记录的可预测的偶发照料的积极影响，导致了这样的推断，即照顾者在婴儿期的头几年以可预测的方式对他们的孩子做出反应，影响了发育中的大脑。

Each year, state-funded schools in England are provided with roughly £2 billion of additional funding, with the aim of reducing the persistent attainment gap in children (The Pupil Premium, Roberts, 2022). Chaotic and unpredictable home environments, characterised by unexpected fluctuations in noise, erratic caregiving behaviour and a lack of structure in daily activities, have been associated with a range of adverse academic, mental health and behavioural outcomes in children (Marsh, Dobson and Maddison, 2020). However, it is still largely unknown how this type of adverse environment influences brain development, and what the underlying computational mechanisms involved are. Until we understand this, we cannot begin to design interventions to improve learning and mental health outcomes, which are essential to helping protect vulnerable children.Childrens' early home environments can be more or less predictable in a range of different ways (Evans & Wachs, 2010). In this proposal I shall focus on one aspect of predictability, namely caregiver responsiveness. Infancy and toddlerhood has been described as a sensitive period for caregiver inputs (Gee and Cohodes, 2021). These inputs include both the predictability of how a caregiver responds to a child's early affective displays (expressions of positive affect such as smiles (Murray et al., 2016), and negative affect such as cries (Wass et al., 2019)), and how sensitive the caregiver is in supporting their infant's early interactions with the world around them (e.g. how contingently they follow the child's attention patterns) (Mason et al., 2019). Children exposed to unpredictable, fragmented signals from their mothers during their first year of life showed poorer performance on a range of cognitive outcomes during later life, after accounting for covariates (Glynn and Baram, 2019). Caregiver responsivity has specifically been shown to protect against adverse effects of household chaos on long-term outcomes (Vernon-Feagans et al., 2016). This biological embedding of predictability, and the positive effects of predictably-contingent caregiving documented in literature, leads to the inference that caregivers behaving in a predictable manner in response to their child in the first few years of infancy influences the developing brain.