Studying infant cognition by EEG and ERP
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1
Central European University, Hungary
One can measure the functional brain activation of babies for several purposes. First, variations of neural activation measured in controlled situations may reveal how the infant brain works, and when these results are compared across development or with those of adults, they allow insights into early functional development of the cerebral cortex. Second, correlating neural activations with behavioral performance across individuals can generate hypotheses about the neural mechanisms that underlie overt behavior, and may lead to a better understanding of individual differences or developmental disorders. Finally, functional brain activations in infants can be used to test, support, or falsify theories of infant cognitive development—as long as such activations could be plausibly identified as neural 'signatures' of certain kinds of representations or computations.
In this talk, I will illustrate this third, most modest, usage of neuroscientific approach to infant cognition by four examples. First, we used event-related potentials to test whether 5-month-old infants are subject to the audio-visual McGurk illusion - a question that would be particularly difficult to answer by purely behavioral methods. Second, event-related gamma-band oscillations revealed that 4-month-olds interpret certain dynamic facial expressions (such as direct gaze and eye-brow raise) as communicative signals. This finding was also supported by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which measures haemodynamic changes in the infant brain. Third, similar gamma-band oscillatory responses indicated that learning object labels modify the visual processing of the associated objects in the infant brain. Finally, a recent finding demonstrates how measurements of motor activation during action perception by the attenuation of the sensorimotor alpha waves could be used for disambiguating behavioral findings concerning action interpretation in infants. Electrophysiological techniques provide an excellent tool to study the cognitive development in young infants.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Invited Talk
Citation:
Csibra
G
(2009). Studying infant cognition by EEG and ERP.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.004
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Received:
19 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
19 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Gergely Csibra, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, csibrag@ceu.hu