Psychology professor Steven Holochwost is the co-director of a four-year, $2.9 million project to study pre-school children’s parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity and its associations with school readiness, with the ultimate goal of improving early education for children facing poverty.

The PNS is a neurophysiological system in our body that helps regulate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as we respond to our environment and interact with others. This research will look at how certain patterns of PNS activity may relate to school readiness and early school success among children from backgrounds of economic disadvantage.

The interdisciplinary project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, looks at children’s PNS activity in the classroom by measuring their heartbeats when interacting with teachers and the broader classroom environment.

“Historically, studies of early childhood education mainly focused on cognitive assessments. More recently, researchers have examined social-emotional function in the classroom, but there are still relatively few studies that have examined children’s neurophysiological activity in classroom settings,” said Holochwost.

Building on research showing that the PNS is sensitive to changes in the classroom environment and important for school readiness, Holochwost and his colleagues are investigating how kids placed at risk by poverty may respond neurophysiologically to changing conditions in the classroom, and how those changes may relate to school readiness and early school success.

“These children are disproportionately likely to come from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in developmental research, and particularly research that features the collection of neurophysiological data,” Holochwost said. 

Data collection for the study will be led by faculty and researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC), who will work with children attending local Head Start and other publicly-supported preschool programs. Holochwost and his team at Lehman College's Regulation, Education, and Neuroscience (ReNeu) Lab will clean, code, and analyze the data, and will then collaborate with UNC researchers to share findings from those analyses.

“Our hope is that the results might eventually be used to help create supportive educational environments for young children, based, in part on those children’s neurophysiological function in the classroom,” he said. 

He added that the study “will provide invaluable experience for students who are interested in child development, neuroscience, and early education.”