By Theo Farrant &AP
Release date
A new study of two-month-old infants shows that their brains are much more developed than previously thought, and are capable of distinguishing between living and inanimate objects.
These findings were made by researchers at Trinity College, Dublin, who analyzed fMRI images of the brains of more than 130 infants.
fMRI imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is a technique that measures changes in blood oxygen levels, allowing researchers to see how our brains respond to different visual stimuli.
The study was published on Monday natural neurosciencecould ultimately help scientists and doctors better understand cognitive development in infancy and how mental health conditions develop later in life.
How was the research conducted?
The study involved 2-month-old children undergoing brain scans while they were awake. The babies were placed in beanbags, noise-canceling headphones placed over their ears, and viewed images from more than a dozen categories commonly seen in the first year of life.
These images included pictures of cats, birds, rubber ducks, shopping carts, and trees.
“So when you see a cat, your brain may activate in a certain way that can be recorded with an fMRI machine, and that’s a characteristic pattern for that cat. And if I show you something very different, like an inanimate object or a tree, your response pattern may be completely different,” explains lead author Cliona O’Doherty.
“And we know that in adults, this is very reliable and consistent, and that adults have distinct responses to categories and things like animate and inanimate objects. But we didn’t really know yet whether this was the case in infants. So that’s exactly what we were looking for in infants,” she added.
In this study, many of the babies returned at nine months of age, and the researchers were able to collect data from 66 of them.
O’Doherty said the brains of nine-month-olds were able to distinguish between living and inanimate objects more strongly than those of two-month-olds.
Why is this research important?
The study shows that infant brains process the world in a much more complex way than previously assumed, the researchers said.
“Infants know much more than we think, and their brains process the world around them in very complex ways. They don’t just lie there passively and wait until they can move around and talk on their own. There’s a lot of complex cognitive development happening in the first year of life, and now we can use this kind of method to actually start measuring that,” O’Doherty said.
Gustavo Sudre, professor of genomic neuroimaging and artificial intelligence at King’s College London, said the findings could have implications for understanding. mental health Neurodevelopmental disorders also occur later in life.
“When we see that they form these representations in their brains much earlier than we think, and that they don’t express them behaviorally, we see that there is already a representation in the brain that is not expressed in their behavior because of the aforementioned lag,” he explains.
“And that’s really interesting to us, especially when we start talking about mental health disorders, because we often diagnose certain disorders based on behavior, but whatever is causing it may be sitting in the brain much earlier.”