What is the difference between 'good' and 'bad' stress? Understanding possible effects of socio-economic status on learning.

Stress energizes learning. The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), which is the pattern of nerves running through the body that enacts the body's stress response, acts to maintain a state of anticipatory readiness - one in which we are alert and ready to receive new information. Information presented during this alert state is subsequently better retained.

For my recent research, hosted at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, I have been leading a small research unit to study stress and learning in typical, middle-class young children. Our research has focused on exploring these 'good' aspects of stress. We have shown, for the first time, that children who show a larger spontaneous response to an experimentally presented stressor are also better at learning pictures of other children's faces. Using new, advanced analytical techniques based on time-series analyses, we have also shown that children who show more spontaneous, sudden fluctuations in stress levels show better learning.

However, there is also a down-side to stress. This is shown most markedly in individuals from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. A number of recent studies have concluded that the associations widely observed between low SES and poor academic performance may be entirely attributable to the fact that individuals from low SES backgrounds tend to experience more frequent, and intense, stressful early life events. Although the exact mechanisms are unknown, it is thought that increased stress during early life associates with a poorer ability to concentrate, and therefore to learn.

So how to reconcile these 'good' and 'bad' aspects of stress during early development? Understanding this question is vital - both for understanding the mechanisms that disrupt early learning in high-risk individuals, and for developing new techniques to improve learning across all children. Yet remarkably little previous research has recorded whether different individuals are exposed to different levels of external, environmental noise during early development - nor investigated how these associate with differences in their internal stress reactivity. Under this Fellowship, I would use recently developed technologies to do this for the first time.

To address these questions, I shall take a cohort of infants from mixed socio-economic status backgrounds, recruited at birth in East London, and quantitatively track how attention, learning, ANS activity and external environmental stressors vary during early life. Using cutting-edge new technologies I shall examine whether children differ in the total amount of environmental noise to which they are exposed - and whether relationships can be found between how much noise and individual is exposed to, and how well they perform on attention and learning.

To mentor me on this project I have been fortunate to secure the support of three leading international scientists. Professor Cynthia Fu, based at the University of East London, will assist me in setting up the recruitment of children from mixed SES backgrounds. Professor John Duncan, in Cambridge, is an internationally renowned expert on attention, and will advise me on the cognitive and analytical aspects of the project. Professor Mark Johnson, at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, is an expert on understanding early typical and atypical development, including the early development of Autism and Attention Deficit Disorder, and will advise me on potential links to clinical populations. The proposal also includes a visit to the lab of Dr Ronny Geva, in Israel, to learn new techniques for measuring early stress from experts in her lab.

i) Academic impact.
I have a proven track record of conducting high-impact research. For my PhD I developed new, computerised techniques to train the voluntary control of attention in infants. These new training techniques have been adopted by other groups as the basis for successful funding applications to the Medical Research Council, ESRC, British Academy, Nuffield Foundation, NIHR, MQ-charity and Wellcome Trust, in projects in the UK, EU and US. These target infants from atypical developmental groups including those at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders and Attention Deficit Disorder.

In addition, during my PhD and postdoc I developed new methods to study early attention in three ways. First, I developed techniques to analyse data quality during infant eyetracking. This work has had substantial international impact, and I am regularly invited to teach masterclasses on the subject. Second, I created techniques to understand the role of exogenous factors (such as low-level salience) in guiding attention during spontaneous, naturalistic orienting. This has led to publications that can improve the design of child-directed screen media, such as TV. Third, I developed algorithms for measuring micro-temporal eye movements. These techniques have shed fresh light on infants in early stages of developing Autism, published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Over the past four years I have written 22 articles (15 first-authored) either published or under review in good-quality, international journals. One article that I have written has already received more than 100 citations.

As described above (in the Academic Beneficiaries section) my proposed research programme has a range of potential academic beneficiaries. These include scientists attempting to understand the role of stress in development; applied researchers aiming to understand how SES affects learning, clinicians, and educationalists. Pathways for maximizing this impact are described in Pathways to Impact.

ii) Non-academic impact.
I am an experienced, and nationally recognised, science communicator: I am one of the host scientists on the television series The Secret Lives of 4-Year-Olds (Channel 4/Wellcome Trust), and have talked regularly on-screen about stress and learning as part of that television series.

I have also given talks in the main house of the Royal Institution for school-aged children, and represented the Royal Institution internationally (in France and Kazakhstan). I have given countless public lectures, to lay audiences of 600+, for the Sutton Trust, Teach First program, and many others.

My work has also featured in the national and international print media (e.g. BBC News, Huffington Post), as well as on national radio (e.g. BBC Radio 4).

The themes of this proposal are of major relevance to parents. From my experience, I find that many parents are often surprisingly unaware that different children have different levels of autonomic arousal, and that this can affect their behavior in a variety of ways. For example, they appear unaware that a stressful situation (such as a noisy shopping centre) can affect a child much more than it would an adult - and that this may influence their behaviour, such as by triggering a tantrum. This lack of insight can change how adults respond to children - they might punish the child, instead of empathising with them.

On the other hand, many parents worry that factors such as raising children in urban environments, and exposing them to intensive computer game playing, can 'stress out' children. Our findings may highlight how early exposure to environmental noise can affect a child's attention and learning capacities. Thus, another potential impact of our research is to lead to attempts to reduce the amount of external, environmental stress to which children are exposed during early life.

Pathways for maximising this impact are described in the Pathways to Impact document.