Nick Turk-Browne, PhD, (Yale University) gives a talk as part of the CNS at 30: Perspectives on the Roots, Present, and Future of Cognitive Neuroscience special session at CNS 2023 in San Francisco.

Abstract: Until 2020, there were three fMRI studies in awake infants performing cognitive tasks. This stood in contrast to thousands of task-based fMRI studies in adults and older children over the preceding three decades. It was not for a lack of need or interest, as the field of infant cognition has long struggled (and still achieved great success) with overdetermined behavioral measures such as looking time. Neuroscientific methods have the potential to delineate multiple drivers of these simple behaviors and to record cognition incidentally with high-throughput, dynamic measures. Scalp EEG and fNIRS have made important contributions in this direction, but fMRI holds distinct advantages, including whole-brain coverage with access to deep-brain structures, spatial precision for revealing neural tuning and representations, and the possibility of building on notable advances in fMRI design, acquisition, and analysis from adult studies. In this talk, I will present the approach my lab has developed for awake infant fMRI and share some of our recent progress, including on retinotopic mapping, face perception, attentional cuing, statistical learning, and event segmentation. I will also highlight some of the big open questions that awake infant fMRI could address in principle, such as why infants are such proficient learners, why we all have amnesia for infant experiences, and how infants perceive and think about their environment. Despite countless limitations and challenges at present, this work suggests that awake infant fMRI could become feasible, useful, and ubiquitous in cognitive neuroscience.

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