Read the summary and the most important questions on Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

• 1 Introduction & Methods of Experimental Infant Research

• 1.1 Introduction

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• Definition of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

  Interdisciplinary scientific field, which is:
  

  • concerned with development of cognitive functions
  • concerned with development of their neural basis
  • directed at understanding the relation between neural and cognitive phenomena

• General difficulties with research in children:

  • Infants are indifferent to instructions
    
  • have a short attention span
  • won't sit still
  • are delicate (gevoelig) subjects

• Approval of (medical) Ethics Committee

  They weight whether what I ask to a child is imbalanced with what the results would give back and cannot be distressing or medically harming

• 1.2 Structural Brain Development

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• What do we know about early structural brain development?

  Not that much, because we only had animal studies, autopsy studies and Neuroimaging studies

• fMRI -> rare in infants because:

  • Infants should be aware
    
  • infants should be motionless
  • presentation of auditory/language stimuli is problematic due to the noise in the scanner

• Differences EEG data between infants and adults

  • Responses are slower in infants
    
  • ERP morphology can be different and can happen at different times
  • babies can have components adults don't
  • frequency range are shifted
  • these slowly move towards the adults' as they grow up

• 1.3 Behavioural Experiments

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• Marker tasks - for who is it used? when is it used?

  • infants of different ages
    
  • in various contexts to get insight into interrelations between developmental changes in observable behaviour and brain structures

• Marker taks - why is it used?

  • Investigate neurodevelopmental models
    
  • to determine whether behavioural observations are consistent with expectations derived from our current understanding of neurological development

• The same behaviour might be mediated by different neurological structures at different stages of development -> since we must infer what babies are thinking so we use to methods such as

  • Infant's expectations
    
  • visual fixation method
  • anticipatory looking
  • Infant in control
  • preferential looking paradigm
  • head turn paradigm
  • high amplitude sucking
  • existing preferences / knowledge vs. Examining learning

• Habituation paradigm - new stimulus is presented

  New stimulus:
  

  • Dis-habituation: infant perceives a difference
    
  • No dis-habituation: no change in reaction: infant perceives no difference