FORAGEKID PROJECT

The understanding of human brain development is a crucial challenge for the future of our society: our children. Executive Functions (EF) involve essential processes in our daily life related to selective attention, cognitive control, information processing, working memory, and decision-making. The study of visual foraging has revealed essential knowledge about EF in adults but has never been applied in children. We have applied hybrid foraging in children as a new way to understand cognitive development. At the VAL (BWH-Harvard Medical) we have developed a task where a complete set of EF can be assessed within a single children-based and enjoyable video game-like task. The innovative and multidisciplinary study is based on theoretical models, behavioral data, and eye-movement recordings. Our first study with a large sample of almost 300 participants from 4 years old to young adults have shown how different EF processes can be studied with our task, and remarkably those related to decision processes of search quitting rules, that seem to mature early in development. Also, preliminary results in more real-world environments have shown that optimality for those decisions is roughly similar across the lifespan. Finally, at the returning phase at the Host (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), we will take a further step by assessing this innovative foraging tasks to train EF in children through behavioral and neuro-functional measures using magnetoencephalography (MEG). The commercialization of the newly developed tests will be exploited together with an industrial partner. The outcome will be significant for the development of technology, products, and strategies to meet the needs of the youngest members of our population.

WORK PERFORMED SO FAR...

During the first two years of the outgoing phase at the BWH-Harvard Medical, we implemented Experimental Series A, B & C, as expected in the initial proposal, developing two different hybrid foraging video game-like tasks for children: A simple stimuli foraging task using basic shapes and colored stimuli (see Figure 1), and a more realistic environment using familiar toys within a jungle background (see Figure 2), joining objectives of series B & C. For the first set of experiments (A), we run a large sample (about 300 participants) from 4 years old to 25 years old. We knew from previous work in Visual Search (VS), in which we firstly based part of this project and recently published (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al., 2020), that these typical VS task essentially overlapped executive functions as they are defined from neuropsychological assessments in clinical practice.

In series A, we replicated previous findings and refined them by including decision-making aspects of the non-exhaustive foraging. Although young children seem to leave the search a bit earlier than older children, adolescents, and young adults, the decision-making processes responding to quitting rules in search seem to mature early in development. The results were disseminated in several conferences, in a symposium organized by the fellow dedicated to visual search and foraging in the lifespan and the real world, and in several educational contexts at Cambridge, MA. Also, we are waiting for the final decision of publication in a Q1-JCR journal (delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic).

The second set of experiments (B&C-Figure 2) are still in progress, although we have some preliminary results. Thanks to a new collaboration with another MSCA project, we also tested older adults within a lifespan, together with a working memory manipulation. The preliminary results show that the optimality of these decisions seems to follow a similar pattern in the lifespan: Both children and older adults are slower, as any cognitive-developmental theory would predict, but the decisions are roughly optimal at both boundaries in the lifespan. We have also disseminated part of these results in several conferences in different research forums and will continue showing the results in up-coming virtual conferences during 2020.

Finally, in the returning phase at the UCM in Madrid, we will test if training in our new foraging task can enhance EF functions in children, both from a behavioral and a neuropsychological point of view using MEG to look for changes and modulations in brain activity.

PROGRESS AND IMPACT OF THE PROJECT SO FAR...

In the FORAGEKID project, we have developed a new hybrid foraging video game-like task to study executive functions in children. This new task allowed us not only to study the development of executive functions but also to extend our knowledge about decision-making processes, particularly those framing how quitting rules work in visual search.

As expected in the project, the results were disseminated in several important conferences in the field: The Vision Science Society - VSS 2019 in Florida (see here the oral presentation of those results), The Psychonomic Society in Nov. 2019 in Montreal (see here the oral presentation of those results, pg. 52) and the Virtual-VSS in June 2020 (see here the presentation too, pg. 38). Also, a symposium was organized by the fellow dedicated to Visual Search at the VSS 2019 in Tampa, where we spread the main results of the study, together with invited speakers from all over the world (Germany, England, Spain, the US…). . Here is the link to the symposium “Visual Search: From youth to old age, from the lab to the world”.

We also disseminated the results of the study in several schools in Cambridge, MA (USA) area (where the Visual Attention Lab at BWH-Harvard Medical is located), both for teachers and families. Notably, we implemented an educational and social activity, The ForageKid Club, at the Cambridge Community Schools in Cambridge, MA (USA) – see here on page 14, as an initial pilot assessment for future effects on cognitive training of executive functions through our new Foraging task. This is one of the projected benefits to society of this new foraging task as a new way to assess EF in children, and a potential rehabilitation of children with attentional problems, supporting teachers in primary and secondary schools using a playful video game-like exercise and test. It is also outlined as a way of assisting parents to understand how cognition operates in their daughters and sons by disseminating the results directly to society. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic stopped our ForageKid Club in early March 2020, as schools had to turn virtual during most of the spring semester of 2020 until the end of the school year in Massachusetts. As soon as the Covid-19 situation will be safe enough, we will retake this as one of our main efforts to implement, as a central social impact of the project.

Also, we spread the results of the work in other academic environments like the Real Colegio Complutense-Harvard (see here my ongoing collaboration with the RCC-Harvard), giving more visibility in a broader academic field.

Related work was published during the outgoing phase too (see here our publication in Visual Search in children early in 2020, within OpenAccess basis), as well as the experimental series A report, also sent to a Q1-JCR journal for publication, although with the current pandemic situation the final decision from the journal is being still delayed.

Coming in the returning phase to Europe at the Lab of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (CTB-UCM-UPM) UCM in Madrid, we will test if training in our new foraging task can enhance EF functions in children (retaking the ForageKid Club), both from a behavioral and a neuropsychological point of view, since we will test children while doing the task using MEG to look for changes and modulations in brain activity.

As projected in the proposal, now we have enough data to share after ending the outgoing phase in Harvard developing the new foraging video game-like task, we are working on the Social Media (Twitter, Facebook) to spread those results now back in Europe (we aim to participate this 2020 year in the Research European Night) and worldwide, as well as to promote our future MEG research at the UCM in Madrid, again if Covid-19 allows.

Although not anticipated in the proposal, we have already contacted with the Direction of the ADHD organizations in Spain to spread our results (we had an informal meeting in February where they stood very interested in our results, and a more formal one scheduled for the Annual ADHD meeting in Spain in mid-March 2020, both with the direction again but importantly with the Association families; however it had to be canceled because of the Covid-19 again). Our aim here was looking for future collaborations in the framework of a forthcoming submission within the ERC program and as a continuation of the MSCA project.

Finally, new collaborations in different scientific domains arose from the present project. Particularly, in the behavioral economics, we have participated in a work studying different profiles in cheating behavior (see here the spread of this work in social media too; specifically The New York Times, among others), that has led to a more extensive collaboration joining cheating studies and decision making behind foraging behavior, and how they might interact with each other. A new Ph.D. Student financed by the CAM (Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid) is currently being co-supervised within an industrial doctorate joining both disciplines.