FH-UBSN Joint Distinguished Lecture: How neuroimaging methods can be used to gain insights about infant cognition and language development

Abstract:
For over a century, behavioral methods have been used to chart the milestones of cognitive and language development in human infants. While we have learned a great deal about the capacities of infants to perceive, understand, and interact with objects and social agents, it is difficult to infer the mental states of pre-verbal infants from behavior alone. Modern neuroimaging methods developed to study the adult brain have great promise for understanding the mental states of the infant brain. The speaker will review how machine-learning techniques can be applied to both EEG and fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) signals to gain insights about cognitive and language development in human infants. These studies use both univariate and multivariate analyses to reveal predictive signals and to decode mental states on a trial-by-trial basis. These methods are powerful tools not only for studies of normative development, but also for application to clinical populations.  

Bio:
Prof Aslin has published widely in several sub-areas of infant development, including perceptual and motor systems, speech and language acquisition, and statistical learning. Recently, he has extended his research from behavioral methods to neuroimaging measures using fMRI, EEG, and fNIRS. His collaborative work has shown that the infant brain deploys predictive signals to encode expected events and that both EEG and fNIRS signals have sufficient fidelity to “decode” events on a trial-by-trial basis. Aslin is the recipient of several major awards, including the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award (2014) and the APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement (2015), and several honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the National Academy of Sciences (2013).