Ecological Assessment of Working Memory Updating in the Context of Parental Mentalizing via Event Segmentation

• In Event: Advances in Understanding Maternal Memory Processes from Pregnancy to Postpartum: Risk-Buffering, ‘Baby-Brain,’ and Ecological Approaches

Abstract

Introduction. Parental self-regulation is considered a determinant of parenting contributing to sensitive caregiving (e.g., Crandall et al., 2015). Working memory updating (WMU), the ability to keep track of relevant information, is a core self-regulation process with special importance for real-time understanding of infant mental states and needs (‘mentalizing’) and sensitive caregiving (Yatziv et al., 2018). However, the mechanisms by which WMU supports caregiving remain unclear. Incorporation of cognitive theories of naturalistic real-time processing into theories of caregiving, and development of corresponding ecological measures in the caregiving context, are crucial steps in answering this gap. According to event segmentation theory (Zacks, 2020), working memory helps in organizing the structure of one’s typically overloading environment based on ‘events’; this ‘event segmentation’ helps predict what is about to happen, but event transitions require WMU. We suggest that event segmentation facilitates parents’ ability to monitor changes in the child, specifically their mental states, an ability we term ‘mental-event segmentation.’
Aims. In a proof-of-concept study, the notion of event segmentation was applied to the caregiving context. Two versions of the event-segmentation task (EST) were developed to examine whether naturalistic infant activity can be segmented into general and mental events (i.e., mental states changes).
Method. 178 female students (Mage=23.78) completed two EST tasks. First, participants completed the standard EST (Sargent et al., 2013), in which they viewed scripted movies of adults performing every-day activities and were asked to press a key whenever one event had ended and another had begun. Afterwards, they watched four additional movies, each presenting an infant playing; one group performed the EST (Infant-EST; N=85), whereas the other was asked to segment based on changes in infant mental-state (Mental-EST; hereafter, ‘MEST’). Participants explained each press, and explanations were coded as mental or behavioral. Fifteen developmental clinicians (Mage=42.27) completed the MEST.
Results. Group norms, the proportion of participants who identified an event boundary at each 1-second bin (Figure 1), indicated general group agreement on event boundaries as commonly observed on the EST, indicating that infant activity can be parsed into general and mental events. The medium-sized correlations between group norms (Table 1) indicate that infant-EST and MEST tap into only-partially overlapping events. Supporting the validity of assessing segmentation of infant mental states, 88% of participants’ explanations on the MEST indeed referred to mental states (vs. 15% in Infant-EST), and developmental clinicians’ performance was more strongly related to MEST than infant-EST (Table 1; Zs > 2.65, ps < .01). Individual differences in segmentation performance on the adult and infant versions were significantly correlated, but associations were stronger for Infant-EST than MEST.

Conclusions. WMU can be assessed ecologically via segmentation of infant videos. Mental-event segmentation is related to, but also distinct from, “general” segmentation, highlighting the need to assess self-regulation processes in context. The MEST can be used to investigate how parents monitor changes in infants’ mental states to support sensitive caregiving. Future directions include extension to parental samples and manipulation of infant temperament to understand the impact of infant characteristics on parental self-regulation and mentalizing.

Authors

• Tal Yatziv, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Michal Levy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Naama Atzaba-Poria, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Yoav Kessler, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev