From eating disorders to women's situations: Extending the boundaries of psychological inquiry

This paper seeks to extend feminist critiques of the prevalent psychiatric approaches to the eating disorders. It also includes a critique of feminists' writings that make assumptions similar to, and hence suffer from some of the same theoretical weaknesses as, the prevalent clinical literature. The main purpose is to contribute to the development of a social-historical approach to the study of the relentless pursuit of thinness among women. The social-historical approach is contrasted with individualistic psychological, family systems and multidimensional accounts of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Potential directions suggested by feminist and social-historical analyses of the relentless pursuit of thinness among women are briefly described.     

How infant-directed actions enhance infants’ attention,learning, and exploration: Evidence from EEG and computational modeling

When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents’ action modulations capture infants’ attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent findings, however, suggest that parents might exploit movement variability to highlight actions. We hypothesized that variability in movement amplitude rather than higher amplitude is capturing infants’ attention during IDAs. Using EEG, we measured 15-month-olds’ brain activity while they were observing action demonstrations with normal, high, or variable amplitude movements. Infants’ theta power (4–5 Hz) in fronto-central channels was compared between conditions. Frontal theta was significantly higher, indicating stronger attentional engagement, in the variable compared to the other conditions. Computational modelling showed that infants’ frontal theta power was predicted best by how surprising each movement was. Thus, surprise induced by variability in movements rather than large movements alone engages infants’ attention during IDAs. Infants with higher theta power for variable movements were more likely to perform actions successfully and to explore objects novel in the context of the given goal. This highlights the brain mechanisms by which IDAs enhance infants’ attention, learning, and exploration.