Naturalistic Noise in the Home: How Environmental Noise Influences Attention and Emotion Regulation in Infants

• In Event: 3-246 - Learning in a Noisy World: Regulating Children’s Attention at Home and at School

Integrative Statement

Introduction
From early in life, infants are exposed to a multisensory environment. However, unpredictable and out-of-control stimulations can be detrimental to their development. Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds show elevated physiological stress, reduced focused attention capacities and increased cross-diagnostic rates of mental health problems by kindergarten age. Previous, questionnaire-based research has suggested that chaotic and unpredictable home environments may mediate these relationships. However, no previous research has directly recorded the dynamically fluctuating levels of environmental noise in children’s homes, and documented how these relate to physiological stress and attention control.

Methods
105 12-month-old British infants took part in the project. Participating infants and their parents both wore a specially designed vest consisting of: an auditory microphone; a miniaturised video camera; GPS; electrocardiogram (ECG); actigraph; body temperature probe. Participants wore the vest to capture 8-10 hours of continuous data for a randomly selected ‘day in the life’ (see Figure 1). On a separate day, participating individuals also completed a battery of lab-based tests, during which their focused attention capacities were assessed. This assessment used an eyetracker to measure infants’ ability to maintain a goal to look at a target while moving objects are presented in the peripheral visual field.

Results
Current analyses suggest that infants who experience higher levels of auditory noise in the home environment show increased levels of physiological stress as indexed via increased spontaneous movement levels in naturalistic settings at home (Spearman’s correlation, p=.032) and trend-level decreases in Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (p=.083). Children who experience more naturalistic noise at home also show reduced attention control capacities in a lab-based assessment (p=.01).

Other results presented include cross-correlations to examine how dynamic increases in auditory noise associate with immediate changes in physiological stress. Significant time-locked relationships were observed (Figure 2), suggesting that increases in auditory noise associate with immediate increases in physiological stress over a time-scale of minutes.

Analyses are also presented in which the microphone data were hand-coded to segment sections in which either the infant was vocalising, or an adult was vocalising either directly to the child or to someone else, and other types of ambient noise (eg TV) were present. Analyses suggest that infants’ levels of physiological stress are lowest at times when an adult is talking directly to the infant, and higher when adult-directed TV is playing in the background.

Conclusion
These results suggest that naturalistic noise in the home environment influences attention control and physiological stress in infants.

Authors

• Sam Wass, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Farhan Mirza, University of East London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Celia Smith, University of East London
  Non-Presenting Author