Brad Regas is one of an eight-member research team studying infant cognition and brain development. The team’s research has recently been published in Cognitive Neuroscience. Three grant proposals submitted in the past 18 months have been funded. Their work was receiving international attention, especially since an unanticipated wave of interest in infant cognition prompted by the White House Conference on Children’s Brain Development.

     Brad especially enjoyed the work and collegial relationship with the team’s senior researcher, Pat. She was a very generous mentor but also a very nervous woman. Brad watched Pat during their weekly staff meetings. Pat’s behaviors at these meetings, as well as her departure from them, were timed to a peculiar nervous tick. Five minutes into the meetings Pat would tear a six-inch strip of transparent tape from a dispenser on the table and begin to roll the strip between her fingertips. For fifteen minutes she rolled the tape into a ball, passing it from finger to finger with her thumb, and then passing it to the other hand. Twenty minutes into the meeting she slipped the wadded ball of tape into her mouth. She chewed the tape for the next 15 minutes. Then she left without a word of explanation, guidance, or apology. Was it another meeting? Or, having removed every last bit of nicotine from her fingers and sucking it from the tape, might Pat be in desperate need of a cigarette?