“Cognitive neuroscience in human infants”
Dr. Nicholas Turk-Browne
Professor, Yale University
Date/Time
Tuesday, November 1 2022, 9:30-10:20
Abstract
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during cognitive tasks has transformed our understanding how the human brain gives rise to the mind. However, one human population has been largely left out of this progress — infants. There have been only a handful of task-based fMRI studies in infants, in contrast to numerous resting studies in sleeping infants and task-based studies in older children and adults. This gap is not because there are no interesting questions about the awake infant mind and brain.
Quite to the contrary, infancy presents an incredible window into cognition, during the development of perception, language, action, and concepts. Indeed, infancy is perhaps the greatest period of learning and plasticity across the lifespan. The lack of fMRI studies in awake infants is instead a result of the significant challenges of collecting fMRI data from subjects who move a lot, cannot follow instructions, and have short attention spans. My lab has been working for more than seven years to develop a new framework for awake infant fMRI, including custom advances in experimental design, data collection, and data analysis. This framework has begun to yield discoveries, including about the organization of the visual system, the role of attention networks in orienting, the early function of the hippocampus in statistical learning, and how continuous experiences are segmented into events. In this talk, I will review our approach, discuss these findings, and mention ongoing studies, including about memory development and infantile amnesia.