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

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.