The impact of early life adversity: assessing infancy and early childhood cognition with eye-tracking at home.

ongoing

Early life adversity encompasses a range of experiences, from maltreatment and neglect to parental mental health issues and neighborhood poverty, with long-term effects on mental and physical health. More research is needed to identify sociocognitive risk and protective factors that contribute to adaptive trajectories in at-risk children, especially within diverse socioeconomic and psychosocial contexts. Asynchronous remote testing (participant-administered data collection outside the lab) can enhance sampling and increase access to typically understudied groups. However, its application for assessing neurocognitive development in at-risk populations has not been studied yet. This proposal aims to use innovative remote data collection methods to examine sociocognitive attention biases in infants and children (6-36 months) from families who have experienced early life adversity. The study will be co-designed with families, and practitioners working with them, to enhance engagement and relevance. I will validate the protocol by comparing data collected remotely with data collected at the Psychology Research Center (CIPsi) of the University of Minho, in collaboration with Prof. Adriana Sampaio. I will also collaborate with Prof. Rhodri Cusack (Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin), a leader in pioneering initiatives for at-home infant testing, to implement web-based eye-tracking and automated tools for estimating looking times. This fellowship will establish protocols, techniques, and infrastructure for large-scale screening and monitoring of infants and children across Portugal and globally. The outcomes could influence policy, community support, and targeted interventions for disadvantaged families. A non-academic placement at the ProChild CoLAB, a private non-profit association dedicated to fighting childhood poverty and social exclusion through research-action projects, will maximize the impact and uptake of the results.