The wearable brain imaging headgear, which was developed in collaboration with UCL spin-out Gowerlabs, found unexpected activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that processes emotions, in response to social stimuli, appearing to confirm that babies start processing what is happening to them in social situations as early as five months old.
This latest technology can measure neural activity across the whole outer surface of a baby’s brain. An earlier version developed by the same team could only measure activity in one or two parts of a baby’s brain at a time.
The researchers say this technology could help to map the connections between different brain regions and establish what distinguishes typical and atypical neurodevelopment in the crucial early stages of childhood and shed light on conditions of neurodiversity such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD.
The new device was tested on sixteen babies aged five-to-seven months. Wearing the device, the babies sat on their parent’s lap and were shown videos of actors singing nursery rhymes to mimic a social scenario, and videos of moving toys, such as a ball rolling down a ramp, to mimic a non-social scenario.
The researchers observed differences in brain activity between the two scenarios. As well as the unexpected findings in the pre-frontal cortex observed in response to social stimuli, the researchers found that activity was more localised in response to social stimuli compared to non-social stimuli, validating previous findings from optical neuroimaging and MRI studies.
Currently the most comprehensive way to see what’s going on in the human brain is with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which involves the subject lying very still within the scanner for potentially 30 minutes or more.
The drawback of this approach is that it is difficult to mimic natural scenarios, such as interacting with another person or performing a task, particularly with infants who would need to be asleep or restrained in order for an MRI to successfully image their brain activity.
To help overcome this, in recent years this team of researchers have used a form of optical neuroimaging, called high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), to develop wearable devices that are able to study brain activity more naturally. The technology also has the benefit of being cheaper and more portable than MRI.
Professor Emily Jones, an author of the study from Birkbeck, University of London, said: “The technology developed and tested in this study is a stepping stone towards a better understanding of the brain processes that underlie social development, which we haven’t been able to observe before, outside of the very restrictive bounds of an MRI scanner.
“With this we should be able to see what’s happening in babies’ brains as they play, learn and interact with other people in a very natural way.”
