Early Years

What are babies and toddlers thinking?

Babies can’t tell you what they’re thinking and toddlers may not have all the words necessary to explain themselves. But sophisticated advances in technology are making it possible to get an understanding of their behavioural and cognitive development.

This is the work of the Birkbeck Babylab & Toddlerlab (www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk), a specialist university research centre in the heart of London, which has spent decades perfecting the art of running non-invasive studies of babies and toddlers, with the aim of uncovering how they develop and learn.

Elena Throm is part of a new study at Birbeck which looks at babies’ social interactions and development. As part of the study, she is seeking to understand what environmental cues facilitate the development of brain regions involved in social interaction in that first year of life.

This pioneering study combines an artificial intelligence algorithm with babies’ responses to a range of visual, auditory, or live stimuli, analysed in real time. The algorithm uses the information about individual brain responses to the presented stimuli to identify the set of characteristics that leads to stronger responses in the baby’s social brain network.

Elena is recruiting babies ages 5 to 12 months to help her with this exciting study.

Although babies are happy to sit through Elena’s study, busy toddlers are not!

Developments in mobile technology have allowed Birbeck to create studies that work for toddlers and children who are too busy to stay still. These take place in a ground-breaking and custom designed lab called the CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment). In this immersive virtual reality environment, projectors direct images at the walls and floor of a room size cube.

The CAVE allows researchers to recreate any environment or scenario of interest, from playgrounds and school classrooms to meadows and mountains. The hope is that by conducting research in more naturalistic settings, the findings will be more relevant to life in the real world.

In her current research, Lisanne Schröer is using a combination of motion capture and fNIRS (a child-friendly method to measure oxygen levels of blood in the brain) to investigate whether toddlers brains are interested in a specific task. Toddlers brains are studied via a novel child-friendly ‘helmet.’

Currently, Lisanne is running a behavioural study with 3-yearolds investigating whether children use both hands when constructing a toy house.

The ability to co-ordinate the use of both hands at once is thought to develop in the second year of life. However, when the task is hard, 3-year-olds tend to rely on just one hand. Lisanne’s new toy house task will use easy goals to monitor whether or not these enable 3-year-olds to use both hands.

Lisanne is also conducting studies with older children up to age 6, including one which involves children doing tasks with parents.

Using Birbeck’s new virtual reality lab, Chiara Bulgarelli is researching the role of empathy in toddlers’ daily social interactions. Her project will use virtual reality and fNIRS to investigate the social situations and behaviours that trigger empathic reactions in toddlers. She aims to map the behaviours through which toddlers express empathy and understand which brain regions are responsible for it.

Birbeck also has researchers studying a variety of other areas, including the development of curiosity as a tool for learning and the impact of socioeconomic status and the home environment on school readiness.

If you have a baby, toddler or older child, and would like to help Birbeck with any of its research, you can find out more at www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/toddlerlab

What is fNIRS?

fNIRS is ‘functional near-infrared spectroscopy,’ a child-friendly method to measure oxygen levels of blood in the brain.

It is made up of a comfortable, portable neoprene cap with optical probes including light-emitting and light-detecting fibres. As the fNIRS optodes shine light onto a baby or child’s head, this is then refracted back – like when you shine a flashlight onto your hand. The resulting measurements show the colour of the blood and thus what parts of the brain are oxygenated or deoxygenated and in use. Families has teamed up with Summersdale to off er readers this accessible guide to supporting your child through diff icult experiences and life changes, including divorce, new siblings or the loss of a loved one.

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