Mom charged with leaving her 6-month-old baby in hot car for 5 hours

The infant’s death and that of a child in Arkansas Tuesday who was found unresponsive in a closed vehicle brings the total number of hot car deaths among youngsters to 18 this year. By Marianne Mizera, AccuWeather front page editor Published Aug. 17, 2022 3:38 AM IST | Updated Aug. 17, 2022 5:28 AM IST

A Louisiana mother has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of her 6-month-old infant who police said was left in a hot SUV for five hours on Sunday. In separate incident that occurred Tuesday, police in Fort Smith, Arkansas, are investigating the death of a young child who was found inside a closed car for an unknown amount of time. A good Samaritan saw the child inside the stifling hot vehicle and smashed in a window to pull the youngster out. The person then rushed the child to the hospital, but he died soon after. Temperatures topped 102 degrees Fahrenheit there on Tuesday, according to AccuWeather data. In the Louisiana case, authorities charged Ivy L. Lee, 22, of Lake Charles, with leaving her baby in a vehicle from 10:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m., outside a building where she worked in the city. Temperatures in Lake Charles climbed into the 80s on Sunday, reaching a high of 89 F, according to AccuWeather data. The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office said Lee flagged down a sheriff's deputy about 2 miles from work around 3:45 p.m. and told him the baby was not breathing. The deputy and other officers who arrived on the scene began CPR on the child, who was then transported to a local hospital where she later died. The Sheriff’s Office said that the mother had initially given the deputies two different stories about what happened to her daughter, before finally telling them she had left the baby in the car while she worked.

Ivy L. Lee, 22, of Lake Charles, Louisiana, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of her infant daughter, who she left in her SUV for five hours on Aug. 14, 2022. (Photo/Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office) Lee is being held in Calcasieu Correctional Center on a $1.2 million bond, the Sheriff’s Office said. Data collected by the nonprofit Kids and Car Safety organization shows that more than 1,000 children have died in hot cars since 1990, with most age 3 and younger. At least another 7,300, the group notes, survived but with varying severities of injuries. These latest fatalities bring the total number of child hot car deaths to 18 for the year – all involving children 5 and younger, according to Kids and Car Safety, which tracks figures nationwide. The state of Louisiana ranks No. 5 in the nation with a total of 44 child hot car deaths since 1995, the group said. Experts note that cars become an oven within minutes of being closed. Data has shown that 80% of the temperature increase inside a car occurs in the first 10 minutes, according to Amber Rollins, director of the national non-profit organization KidsandCars.org. “It's important for families to understand that it doesn't have to be 90 degrees outside for a child to suffer from heatstroke inside of a vehicle," Rollins previously told AccuWeather. "We've seen children who have died in hot cars on days where the outside temperature was in the 50s or 60s outside, believe it or not, and that's because a vehicle does act like a greenhouse, so it allows that heat to come in through the windows, traps it inside and it's an oven; it heats up very quickly." Some of the other child hot car deaths reported this year include: • A 3-year-old girl was found unresponsive in a car in Carthage, Missouri, on Friday. The child was taken to a hospital in Joplin before being flown to a critical care hospital in Springfield. She was pronounced dead the next day, police told local media. AccuWeather data showed temps topped 94 degrees for the day. It was unclear how long the girl had been in the hot vehicle and whether the child was inadvertently left in the vehicle or if the child got in on her own. • An infant died on Aug. 9 after being left in a hot car in Washington, D.C. • A toddler died in May after he was left for six hours in a hot vehicle parked outside a daycare center in Memphis, Tennessee. • A 5-year-old boy in June was accidentally left in a car for several hours in the Houston area as the family prepared to celebrate the birthday of his 8-year-old sister. • An 11-month-old boy was left in a hot car in Florida in July.

Baby and adult brains 'sync up' during play

Woman and baby playing (stock image).

Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn't yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be "on the same wavelength," experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions.

A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity. In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact. The research was conducted at the Princeton Baby Lab, where University researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world.

"Previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this 'neural synchrony' develops in the first years of life," said Elise Piazza, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the first author on a paper published Dec. 17, 2019, in Psychological Science.

Piazza and her co-authors -- Liat Hasenfratz, an associate research scholar in PNI; Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience; and Casey Lew-Williams, an associate professor of psychology -- posited that neural synchrony has important implications for social development and language learning.

Studying real-life, face-to-face communication between babies and adults is quite difficult. Most past studies of neural coupling, many of which were conducted in Hasson's lab, involved scanning adults' brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in separate sessions, while the adults lay down and watched movies or listened to stories.

But to study real-time communication, the researchers needed to create a child-friendly method of recording brain activity simultaneously from baby and adult brains. With funding from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Grant, the researchers developed a new dual-brain neuroimaging system that uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is highly safe and records oxygenation in the blood as a proxy for neural activity. The setup allowed the researchers to record the neural coordination between babies and an adult while they played with toys, sang songs and read a book.

The same adult interacted with all 42 infants and toddlers who participated in the study. Of those, 21 had to be excluded because they "squirmed excessively," and three others flat-out refused to wear the cap, leaving 18 children, ranging in age from 9 months to 15 months.

The experiment had two portions. In one, the adult experimenter spent five minutes interacting directly with a child -- playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes or reading Goodnight Moon -- while the child sat on their parent's lap. In the other, the experimenter turned to the side and told a story to another adult while the child played quietly with their parent.

The caps collected data from 57 channels of the brain known to be involved in prediction, language processing and understanding other people's perspectives.

When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world -- perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.

When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared.

That fit with researchers' expectations, but the data also had surprises in store. For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy.

"We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.

"While communicating, the adult and child seem to form a feedback loop," Piazza added. "That is, the adult's brain seemed to predict when the infants would smile, the infants' brains anticipated when the adult would use more 'baby talk,' and both brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to toys. So, when a baby and adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways."

This two-brain approach to neuroscience could open doors to understanding how coupling with caregivers breaks down in atypical development -- such as in children diagnosed with autism -- as well as how educators can optimize their teaching approaches to accommodate children's diverse brains.

The researchers are continuing to investigate how this neural coupling relates to preschoolers' early language learning.

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Materials provided by Princeton University. Original written by Liz Fuller-Wright. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.