WHO WE ARE
OUR AIM AND APPROACH
Our aim is to better understand how both physical and social environments shape young children’s development.
At the moment, almost everything that neuroscientists know about brain development comes from studying children’s brains in tightly controlled and highly artificial laboratory settings, and relying on standarised, adult-designed tests.
At ISEY, we take a different approach.
We emphasise the importance of studying children’s brain function in the complex, dynamic and varied settings where they spend their everyday lives. To do this, we have developed world-leading methods for studying children while they play, interact and learn in real-world environments.
Measuring concentration in the real world
To understand how concentration develops we need to study individual children, paying attention to individual things, in individual, unique real-world settings.
To do this, we have been developing new techniques to measure how children’s brains pay attention moment-by-moment in complex, dynamic, everyday settings.
We've developed ways to measure and study children's brain activity and behaviour in daily life, using affordable wearable sensors and AI to find useful patterns in their home and learning environments.
Understanding the fit between a child and their environment
This is helping us reconsider what drives individual differences between children. When there is a child who is behaving differently from others, it is tempting to assume that a ‘problem’ always lies within that child, rather than looking at how they interact with the environment around them.
At ISEY, we are trying to move away from that mindset, by understanding how a child’s capacity to pay attention, self regulate or communicate is influenced by their environment. Moving learning outdoors, reducing noise, or increasing predictability can help some children thrive but hinder others. It is finding a fit between a child and their environment that is key.
Understanding diverse early life environments
The environments that children grow up in vary greatly, in lots of different ways - from noise, clutter and green space, through to the responsiveness and mood of people around us, and the predictability of resources. At a coarse scale, we know that early life stress affects physical and mental development in a range of different ways - but there is still a lot that we do not understand about how children’s environments affect them, and how they adapt to their environments.
Another gap in our understanding is how two children, growing up in the same family in the same home, may experience markedly different home environments - because their experiences are determined by how they interact with the objects and people around them. Environments are not just external; children actively shape what information they receive from the world through how they interact with it.
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower”
Alexander Den Heijer
