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

每年，英国国家资助的学校获得大约20亿英镑的额外资金，目的是缩小儿童之间持续存在的成就差距（the Pupil Premium, Roberts, 2022）。混乱和不可预测的家庭环境，其特点是噪音的意外波动、照料行为的不稳定和日常活动的缺乏结构，与儿童的一系列不利的学业、心理健康和行为结果有关（Marsh， Dobson和Maddison， 2020）。然而，这种不利环境是如何影响大脑发育的，以及涉及的潜在计算机制是什么，在很大程度上仍然是未知的。在我们了解这一点之前，我们无法开始设计干预措施，以改善学习和心理健康结果，这对帮助保护弱势儿童至关重要。儿童早期的家庭环境或多或少可以通过各种不同的方式进行预测（Evans & Wachs, 2010）。在这个建议中，我将着重于可预测性的一个方面，即照顾者的反应。婴儿期和幼儿期被描述为照顾者投入的敏感时期（Gee和Cohodes， 2021）。这些输入包括照顾者如何回应孩子早期情感表现（积极影响的表达，如微笑（Murray等人，2016）和消极影响，如哭泣（Wass等人，2019））的可预测性，以及照顾者在支持婴儿与周围世界的早期互动方面的敏感性（例如，他们如何偶然地跟随孩子的注意力模式）（Mason等人，2019）。在考虑协变量后，在出生第一年接触到母亲不可预测的、碎片化的信号的儿童，在以后的生活中，在一系列认知结果上的表现更差（Glynn和Baram， 2019）。照顾者的反应性被特别证明可以防止家庭混乱对长期结果的不利影响（Vernon-Feagans等人，2016）。这种可预见性的生物嵌入，以及文献中记录的可预见性偶然照料的积极影响，导致了这样的推论：照料者在婴儿期的头几年以可预测的方式对孩子的反应会影响发育中的大脑。

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.