Assessing care providers’ perceptions and beliefs about physical activity in infants and toddlers: baseline findings from the Baby NAP SACC study

Background: As children now spend increasing amounts of time in out-of-home care, care providers play an important role in promoting positive health behaviors. Little is currently known about providers’ perceptions and beliefs about physical activity, particularly for very young children. This study describes providers’ perceptions and beliefs about infants’ and toddlers’ physical activity, and assesses their knowledge of physical activity guidelines, to establish if and where providers may need support to promote physical activity in child care settings. Methods: We analyzed baseline data from a pilot randomized-controlled trial conducted in 32 child care centers in Massachusetts, USA. Providers completed physical activity-related questionnaires from which we compared twenty perception and belief questions for infant and toddler care providers. Results: 203 care providers (96% female, mean ± SD age: 32.7 ± 11.2 years) from 29 centers completed questionnaires. A large proportion of providers (n = 114 (61.9%)) believed that infants should be active for 45 minutes or less each day, and only 56 providers (29.7%) perceived toddlers to require more than 90 minutes of activity per day. 97% of providers perceived it was their job to ensure children engaged in a healthy amount of physical activity and most (94.1%) perceived physical activity to be important to own their health, despite 13.3% finding it hard to find the energy to be physically active. Conclusions: This study is the first to assess the physical activity perceptions and attitudes of providers caring for infants and toddlers. Though all providers believed toddlers should engage in more physical activity than infants, most providers believed that young children require only a short amount of physical activity each day, below recommended guidelines. How provider perceptions influence children’s physical activity behavior requires investigation

Selective Attention Increases Both Gain and Feature Selectivity of the Human Auditory Cortex

Background. An experienced car mechanic can often deduce what’s wrong with a car by carefully listening to the sound of the ailing engine, despite the presence of multiple sources of noise. Indeed, the ability to select task-relevant sounds for awareness, whilst ignoring irrelevant ones, constitutes one of the most fundamental of human faculties, but the underlying neural mechanisms have remained elusive. While most of the literature explains the neural basis of selective attention by means of an increase in neural gain, a number of papers propose enhancement in neural selectivity as an alternative or a complementary mechanism. Methodology/Principal Findings. Here, to address the question whether pure gain increase alone can explain auditory selective attention in humans, we quantified the auditory cortex frequency selectivity in 20 healthy subjects by masking 1000-Hz tones by continuous noise masker with parametrically varying frequency notches around the tone frequency (i.e., a notched-noise masker). The task of the subjects was, in different conditions, to selectively attend to either occasionally occurring slight increments in tone frequency (1020 Hz), tones of slightly longer duration, or ignore the sounds. In line with previous studies, in the ignore condition, the global field power (GFP) of event-related brain responses at 100 ms from the stimulus onset to the 1000-Hz tones was suppressed as a function of the narrowing of the notch width. During the selective attention conditions, the suppressant effect of the noise notch width on GFP was decreased, but as a function significantly different from a multiplicative one expected on the basis of simple gain model of selective attention. Conclusions/Significance. Our results suggest that auditory selective attention in humans cannot be explained by a gai

Childhood Obesity Prevention in Africa: A Systematic Review of Intervention Effectiveness and Implementation.

Childhood obesity is of increasing concern in many parts of Africa. We conducted a systematic search and review of published literature on behavioural childhood obesity prevention interventions. A literature search identified peer-reviewed literature from seven databases, and unindexed African journals, including experimental studies targeting children age 2-18 years in African countries, published in any language since 1990. All experimental designs were eligible; outcomes of interest were both behavioural (physical activity, dietary behaviours) and anthropometric (weight, body mass index, body composition). We also searched for process evaluations or other implementation observations. Methodological quality was assessed; evidence was synthesised narratively as a meta-analysis was not possible. Seventeen articles describing 14 interventions in three countries (South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda) were included. Effect scores indicated no overall effect on dietary behaviours, with some beneficial effects on physical activity and anthropometric outcomes. The quality of evidence was predominantly weak. We identified barriers and facilitators to successful interventions, and these were largely resource-related. Our systematic review highlights research gaps in targeting alternative settings to schools, and younger age groups, and a need for more rigorous designs for evaluating effectiveness. We also recommend process evaluations being used more widely.The work of Sonja Klingberg and Esther M F van Sluijs was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_12015/7). The work was undertaken under the auspices of the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence (RES-590-28-0002). Funding from the British Heart Foundation, Department of Health, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, is gratefully acknowledged

Early Childhood Obesity Risk Factors : Socioeconomic Adversity, Family Dysfunction, Offspring Distress, and Junk Food Self-Medication.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To explore the sequence and interaction of infancy and early childhood risk factors, particularly relating to disturbances in the social environment, and how the consequences of such exposures can promote weight gain and obesity. RECENT FINDINGS: This review will argue that socioeconomic adversity is a key upstream catalyst that sets the stage for critical midstream risk factors such as family strain and dysfunction, offspring insecurity, stress, emotional turmoil, low self-esteem, and poor mental health. These midstream risk factors, particularly stress and emotional turmoil, create a more or less perfect foil for calorie-dense junk food self-medication and subtle addiction, to alleviate uncomfortable psychological and emotional states. Disturbances in the social environment during infancy and early childhood appear to play a critical role in weight gain and obesity, through such mechanisms as insecurity, stress, and emotional turmoil, eventually leading to junk food self-medication and subtle addiction

Discrimination Contours for Moving Sounds Reveal Duration and Distance Cues Dominate Auditory Speed Perception

Evidence that the auditory system contains specialised motion detectors is mixed. Many psychophysical studies confound speed cues with distance and duration cues and present sound sources that do not appear to move in external space. Here we use the ‘discrimination contours’ technique to probe the probabilistic combination of speed, distance and duration for stimuli moving in a horizontal arc around the listener in virtual auditory space. The technique produces a set of motion discrimination thresholds that define a contour in the distance-duration plane for different combination of the three cues, based on a 3-interval oddity task. The orientation of the contour (typically elliptical in shape) reveals which cue or combination of cues dominates. If the auditory system contains specialised motion detectors, stimuli moving over different distances and durations but defining the same speed should be more difficult to discriminate. The resulting discrimination contours should therefore be oriented obliquely along iso-speed lines within the distance-duration plane. However, we found that over a wide range of speeds, distances and durations, the ellipses aligned with distance-duration axes and were stretched vertically, suggesting that listeners were most sensitive to duration. A second experiment showed that listeners were able to make speed judgements when distance and duration cues were degraded by noise, but that performance was worse. Our results therefore suggest that speed is not a primary cue to motion in the auditory system, but that listeners are able to use speed to make discrimination judgements when distance and duration cues are unreliable