Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionInfant fMRI: A Model System for Cognitive Neuroscience
Section snippets
Infant fMRI
The main objective of cognitive neuroscience has been to understand how the propensities of the mind are implemented in the brain. One of the most prolific and insightful tools in this endeavor has been fMRI (see Glossary) – a technique now used in thousands of studies. However, a vanishingly small number of these studies involved infant participants, and in only a handful were the infants awake and having their behavior monitored (Box 1).
What might be gained by studying the infant brain with
Theoretical Framework
Infants and adults differ in a number of ways, including behavioral outputs (e.g., Figure 1A,B), brain structure (e.g., Figure 1C), and environmental inputs (e.g., Figure 1D,E). This results in fortuitous quasi-experiments in which two periods of development differ in an important and specific way, akin to comparative research with animal models or neuropsychological patients. Such comparisons can lack control due to confounding or unknown differences between groups. Moreover, because adults
Example Cognitive Domains
In what follows, we explore potential gains from conducting quasi-experiments with infant and adult populations for current topics in the cognitive neuroscience of adult memory, attention, and perception (Figure 2). These fields are used as examples to show how neural, cognitive, and experiential contrasts between infants and adults, using fMRI as a method, can inform cognitive neuroscience. Of special interest are questions for which research on adults alone would be difficult or tell only a
Challenges of Infant fMRI
Despite the potential value of infant fMRI in different domains, there are substantial practical obstacles that have prevented widespread adoption of this technique 1, 60, 61. Some of these challenges apply more generally to developmental work (e.g., task design, behavioral measures, fussiness), and so leaning on developmental science when adapting adult fMRI protocols to infancy will be helpful. However, other challenges are more specific to fMRI studies and so require novel technical
Concluding Remarks
Cognitive science has often advanced by taking on new perspectives and adopting new tools. fMRI has been a valuable technique in adults and older children, and there is great promise in using it to elucidate the infant mind and brain. The opportunity to assess cognition incidentally in infants could have a significant impact on developmental science by providing a new kind of dependent measure. Here we emphasized the additional influence this tool could have on cognitive neuroscience more
Acknowledgments
We thank J. Junge, J. Fan, and N. Malek for comments on an early version of this paper and A. Ghazanfar for helpful discussions. N.B.T-B. was supported by NIH grants R01 EY021755 and R01 MH069456.
Glossary
- Complementary learning systems (CLS)
- a rapid, high-fidelity memory system, thought to be instantiated in the hippocampus, supports the gradual consolidation of memories into stable, often generalized representations in another memory system, thought to be instantiated in the neocortex.
- Episodic memory
- the ability to encode an event in the context of the space and time in which it occurs after experiencing it once, and then to retrieve such details based on partial cues in the future.
- fMRI
- brain
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2022, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :This tutorial aims to expand access to time-resolved MVPA and facilitate its future application to novel developmental research. Due to the number of logistical difficulties involved with collecting fMRI data from awake infants (for examples where this is successfully done, see e.g. (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2002; Ellis and Turk-Browne, 2018)) and the relative ease of collecting EEG data, a standard methodology for applying MVPA to infant EEG is extremely valuable. Providing implementations in two commonly used programming languages (Matlab, Python) significantly increases the availability of this method.