Dr Abigail Fiske of Lancaster’s Psychology Department recently undertook an interview with International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) following her award of “Honourable Mention for Outstanding Dissertation” at the ICIS Conference 2024. This interview was recently published in the ICIS community newsletter to promote their “Connecting with the Community” series.

ICIS was formed in the early 1960s, and is a world-renowned community of scientists united in their desire to advance understanding in the field of infant learning and development. It aims to connect academics from across the globe to share scientific best practices, disseminate research findings, and create a nurturing and collaborative environment within the field of developmental psychology. ICIS began the “Connecting with the Community” interview series last year to capture the range of voices within the ICIS community. Dr Fiske – who started at Lancaster in 2024, following the completion of her PhD at Oxford University earlier that year – was approached to give an interview about her dissertation after its nomination for “Outstanding Dissertation” at the ICIS Conference 2024.

Dr Fiske’s dissertation explored the development of children’s executive function skills across key timepoints across the early years of their lives. Tracking around 200 children’s development from the age of ten months to 3.5 years, Dr Fiske and her supervisors were specifically interested in children’s inhibitory control development – the ability think before reacting in a habitual way. In order to study this behavioural development in young children, they used an iPad that displayed a smiley face which, when clicked, would play a short cartoon. Approximately 75% of the time the graphic would appear on one side of the screen (allowing children to form the habit of clicking on that side of the screen), but would appear on the opposite side of the screen 25% of the time, requiring them to inhibit the habitual behaviour they had developed. Additionally, the team utilised a neuroimaging method known as fNIRS (Functional Near-Infared Spectroscopy) to help them identify changes in children’s haemoglobin in the brain when they were having to inhibit their responses.

Despite the COVID Pandemic disrupting the study, Dr Fiske and the team managed to obtain some fantastic results, including the findings that younger infants use only the right-hand side of their prefrontal and parietal cortex, whereas children aged 16 months utilised both sides of the brain to inhibit their responses, despite their being no real change in how successfully they were able to inhibit their behaviours. At the age of 3.5 years, however, the researchers saw an improvement in the children’s ability to control their behaviour, but a return to activation on only the right-hand side of the brain.

On being interviewed by the ICIS about her dissertation, Dr Fiske commented: “Much to my surprise, I received an honourable mention for the Outstanding Dissertation Award at the ICIS Conference last year. It was then so exciting to be interviewed a few months later by the Communications Committee to talk more about my research. The ICIS community are exceptionally supportive, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to share my passion for infant research in this way!”

In addition to the ICIS nomination, Dr Fiske also received the ‘Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Psychology 2024’ from The British Psychological Society (BPS) for the work she undertook during her PhD. Her full paper - Inhibitory control development from infancy to early childhood: A longitudinal fNIRS study – can be read online.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101557