Developmental Change in Psychophysiological Systems: Lessons from Computational Biology

• In Event: 3-123 - New Methodological Approaches and Applications in the Study of Children’s Multisystem Physiology

Integrative Statement

The papers in this symposium examine “physiological coordination” as an index of individual differences among children, as well as the dynamics on both acute (moment-to-moment change across situations) and protracted (developmental change across age) time scales. Indeed, there is an increasing interest in physiological coordination (“synchrony”) both within-person and within-dyad (e.g., Gates & Liu, 2017; Palumbo et al., 2017). This has resulted in a wide range of statistical approaches being used to define coordination (e.g., cross-correlations, auto-regressions, frequency decompositions, differential equations), most of which rely on exploratory fitting of time-series data rather than theoretically derived models that are guided by the structure of the biological systems that drive coordination. In this paper, we illustrate how research paradigms used in computational biology can be adapted for study of how humans’ psychophysiological coordination change with age.

In the field of computational biology, statistical models have been developed to describe, and predict, how physiological signals govern the emergence and development of patterns on animals’ skins. These models capture differences among species (e.g., leopard spots, zebra stripes) as well as the unique patterns of each animal within a species (Murray, 1988). Naturally occurring processes that underlie many self-organizing phenomena, including pattern formation, may be described using relatively simple “dual-process” models. For example, a two-component system might consist of an activator that stimulates its own production as well as the production of the inhibitor, which in turn represses production of the activator – a negative feedback loop (e.g., Geier & Meinhardt, 1972).

Merging methods adapted from computational biology with multiple time-scale study design (Nesselroade, 1991; Ram & Diehl, 2015), we illustrate how specific physiological phenomena of interest to developmentalists – such as physiological coordination and synchrony – can be articulated in a mathematical terminology that provides precise mapping of theoretical concepts to the wide variety of qualitative and quantitative interindividual differences in change observed in longitudinal studies of psychophysiology. We demonstrate how simulation-based experiments, wherein synthetic data are generated for 100-year lifespans (as shown in Figure 1), can be used to articulate and test how the propositions outlined in, for example, the adaptive calibration model (Del Guidice et al. 2011) actually play out with respect to development. Our initial conclusion is that some of the propositions be reconsidered.

The mathematical, physical, and biological tractability of many “dual process” models has been worked out. We provide a framework for elaborating how these models can be used and/or adapted for studying and explaining how different kinds of physiological coordination contribute to development. Applied thoughtfully, we believe these methods can fill in knowledge about the actual mechanisms responsible for adaptive calibration and contextual sensitivities that have thus far only been described in broad strokes.

Authors

• Nilam Ram, Penn State University
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Yang, Penn State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Gatzke-kopp, Penn State University
  Non-Presenting Author