DISC Welcomes Dr Amanda Tan!

A tale as old as time. I had my first baby in 2021 and he threw me into infant sleep research - he woke up every two hours for the first year and a half of his life, and as a first-time mum I was not prepared for this at all. I went down rabbit holes of often contrasting information about how babies should be sleeping and how to get my baby to sleep better, and my social media algorithm in turn bombarded me with advice from "sleep experts", parent influencers, and companies touting products promising better sleep. Be it a blessing or a curse, the scientist in me forced me to evaluate every claim and seek out empirical evidence, and through the work of Helen and colleagues at DISC, I began to understand my baby's sleep as biologically normal. Sleep deprivation was still difficult of course, but the research set my mind at ease that my baby's sleep was not a problem (for him!) and being confident about my choice to safely bedshare got us through the long nights. Happy to report that he now puts himself to bed and sleeps through, so for those in the thick of it, it really doesn't last forever! 

On maternity leave however, I met so many other mums also grappling with their baby's sleep and struggling to deal with the mess of information and advice alongside their own and their baby's needs. I began to think about how parents make sense of the all the information and misinformation they are exposed to, what makes certain influencers so popular and certain messages so impactful whether or not science exists to support them. 

I now have two young children, so I no longer want to spend months away from them studying monkeys (even though my primate research takes place on islands in Thailand!) As a primatologist, I was interested in cultural transmission - understanding how information spreads through groups via social learning, why some information is more easily transmitted, and why certain individuals are more influential in social learning networks. We know that humans learn and transmit information in the same ways, which explains both our rich cultures as well as things like cults of personality and the spread of fake news, but I found that surprisingly little research has been done in the context of how parents learn about infant care, where the landscape of information and opinions is particularly vast and varied. This is what I'm hoping to understand going forward in my career, and to help figure out ways in which we can make evidence-based information and recommendations "go viral". 

AI has very suddenly and quickly become widely available. Given how difficult it is to navigate the landscape of information, it wouldn't be surprising that parents increasingly rely on AI to look for the answers to their questions for them. AI bots have also been trained to converse with people in a very realistic and emotive way, so AI-generated advice can feel much more empathetic and personalised than a traditional Google search or even a conversation with a professional. We have to remember though that AI builds its responses based on information from across the internet, so we really don't know how accurate and safe AI-generated advice is. In this project we are aiming to examine how and why parents are using AI, as well as evaluate the quality of AI-generated advice in order to better understand the potential benefits but also the potential harms that using AI can bring for parents and their babies. 

Based on the results of this study, we are hoping to develop guidance for parents on what to be aware of when the use AI, how they can assess the accuracy and safety of AI-generated advice, and how they can better prompt AI to generate scientifically sound advice.