MIND Lab

Minds Interacting n' Developing

Parenting is a significant and challenging role in adults’ lives, and the transition to parenthood is a developmental process that includes many changes in different levels – behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively, and neurologically. Research in the MIND lab seeks to understand the neurocognitive and neuro-affective processes that enable parents to understand their child’s mind (“mentalize”) and support the child’s regulation and socio-emotional development, focusing on understanding how these processes change and develop across the transition to parenthood and the impact of parental stress and emotional distress on their trajectories. Our work employs a range of methodological approaches tapping into different levels of analysis, such as: neural responsivity to infant affective signals (measured using EEG), computerized cognitive tasks and computational modeling of task performance (self-regulation and cognitive control, biases in perceiving and interpreting infant affective signals), as well as interviews and observations of parent-infant interactions and infant development.

Current Projects

Parental mentalizing is a parent’s capacity and tendency to regard their child as a psychological agent and reflect on their child’s mental states as underlying the child’s behavior. This capacity is considered the internal aspect of parental sensitive responsiveness, a hallmark of adaptive caregiving. Despite the importance of parental mentalizing and the focus of interventions on enhancing this parental capacity to bolster parent-child relationships, there is limited knowledge on how parents mentalize: what are the mental processes supporting caregivers’ ability to understand their children’s internal world and experiences? In this ISF-funded project, we study the cognitive underpinnings of parental mentalizing about infant mental states as it occurs in real time, proposing that this ability is supported by event segmentation, the cognitive capacity to parse information into events to process and make sense of what is happening efficiently. Specifically, we suggest that real-time parental mentalizing relies on segmenting infant input based on underlying mental states as events, termed here ‘mental-event segmentation.’ The framework integrates mentalization and attachment theories and methods on the one hand and research on naturalistic cognition on the other hand, and we have developed a new experimental task (the mental event segmentation task, MEST) to further study this ability.

This project is funded by ISF grant #1850/24

In this ongoing research program in collaboration with Dr. Helena Rutherford and the Before and After Baby Lab (BABL), we study the basic mechanisms of how parents notice and decipher the meaning of infant affective cues, such as emotional facial expressions, by conceptualizing processing infant cues as an evidence accumulation process. Evidence accumulation is a class of computational models describing the temporal dynamics of how people reach decisions, applied here to the context of parenting for the first time to examine how caregivers decide whether an infant is currently distressed or not. Evidence accumulation parameters can inform on specific biases in different processing stages: (1) expectancy bias: the pre-existing tendency to expect distress; (2) perceptual discriminability: the speed with which evidence gathers; and (3) stimulus evaluation bias: evidence gathering drifts faster for distress vs. calm/neutral evidence. We are especially interested in how these parameters and biases relate to caregiver mental health (e.g., anxiety), caregiving behavior, and infant emotional reactivity, as well as the trajectory of these biases from pregnancy to postpartum.

In one of the studies, evidence accumulation modeling will be used to tap into neurocognitive origins of negativity bias in processing infant cues as mechanisms in the early intergenerational transmission of anxiety. We suggest that parenting-specific negativity biases—misinterpretation of neutral (calm) infant faces as distressed as modeled by evidence accumulation modeling—may lead to inaccurate interpretation of the infant’s mental state (i.e., failures in mentalizing), and thereby to noncontingent maternal behavioral responsivity to the infant during interactions. Over time, such noncontingent behavior may lead to overemphasis of distress in the dyad, evoke hypersensitivity to potentially negative stimuli in the infant, which would manifest in fearful temperament (an early precursor of anxiety).

This study is supported by SRCD's Small Grants Program for Early Career Scholars and the Yale Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.