Longitudinal investigation of the relations among stress, brain activity, neurocognitive skill, and socioemotional functioning during infancy

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Chronic stress is a profound predictor of detrimental outcomes in children, including lower scores on assessments of cognitive and socioemotional skills essential for academic achievement and increased incidence of developmental delays and health problems. In infancy, mounting evidence has linked chronic maternal stress to alterations in resting neural activity. Correlational and theoretical work suggests changes in early resting neural activity may be an early predictor of later language, cognitive, and socioemotional skills, all essential for school readiness. However, the functional significance of stress-related alterations in brain activity for school readiness is unclear. Furthermore, while maternal stress appears to shape infant brain function, work suggests relations between infant brain function and concurrent language and neurocognitive skills are weak or nonexistent. This suggests that relations between brain activity and behavior may not emerge until later in development (e.g., preschool). Understanding the mechanisms by which chronic stress shapes school readiness skills is essential, as research suggests achievement gaps begin long before school entry and that targeted interventions must rely on an understanding of how environmental influences shape young learners. The proposed research will leverage multivariate stress assessment and multimodal assessments to test a novel framework detailing how stress shapes school readiness skills in children. The proposed research will follow 100 mother-child dyads across the preschool years (ages 3;0-4;11) to address two specific aims. Aim 1 will characterize how maternal and child stress prospectively predict concurrent and longitudinal patterns of child brain activity. In turn, Aim 2 will examine how stress-related patterns of brain activity predict changes in cognitive and socioemotional functioning in the year before school entry. This work is a natural continuation of my findings and training from the K99 phase and establishes the applicant’s independent program of research at Teachers College, Columbia University. The proposed research will provide important insights into how children’s experience of stress shapes their neurocognitive functioning and school readiness. Understanding these pathways is essential for reducing achievement gaps and may ultimately inform interventions aimed at supporting children experiencing stress in order to provide a foundation for optimal development.