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What’s it like to be an infant?

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Research Topics

Learn more about what we do by clicking on the links below.

Attention

Until infants can walk or crawl, the only way for them to explore their world on their terms is with their attention. Infants look at objects that interest them, they look in locations where they expect interesting things to happen, and they look longer at locations where surprising things occur. These capacities for attention are important, but our understanding of how they are controlled in the brain is limited. In particular, it is unclear whether the neural architecture of infant attention resembles the adult attention system. In my work, I showed that infants can robustly deploy attention and that this attention recruits similar, but not identical, neural systems in adults. In particular, we found evidence that frontal cortex is critical for supporting the reallocation of attention, providing evidence against the dogma that the frontal cortex is not functional or behaviorally relevant in infancy. Additionally, the non-overlap in recruited brain regions between infants and adults hints at the possibility that attention in infancy is supported by different component processes than adult attention.

Research highlights:

Ellis, C. T., Skalaban, L. J., Yates, T. S., & Turk-Browne. N. B. (2021). Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants. Proceedings of the National Academia of Sciences, 118 (12)e2021474118. PaperCodeData

Learning

Infancy is the time in our lives when we learn the most, including language, motor skills, and social relationships; yet, as adults, we remember none of the experiences that led to this learning. How is it possible that infants can learn without remembering? In adults, the hippocampus mediates learning by storing new information and slowly consolidating that information into cortex. However, how the infant brain mediates learning is less clear since infants appear to have limited memory of events and experiences, and the hippocampus has a protracted development into adolescence. In my research, I have investigated how the infant brain supports learning and memory. Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities across episodes, is one type of learning I have focused on because it is thought to be foundational to learning during infancy (e.g., language acquisition). I showed that the infant hippocampus is involved in statistical learning, providing the first evidence that this region is functional in human infants as young as four months.

Research highlights:

Ellis, C. T., Skalaban, L. J., Yates, T. S., Bejjanki, V. R., Córdova, N. I., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2021). Evidence of hippocampal learning in human infants. Current Biology, 31, 1-7 PaperCodeData

Perception

The world is abundantly complex, yet our visual system seamlessly and accurately determines what is in our environment. Dating back to William James, it has been assumed that this complexity is a hindrance that our visual system must overcome. In my research with adults, I showed that complexity could help perception by giving it a scaffolding upon which to incorporate incoming information. I have also pursued how the developing brain deals with complexity. I found that infants as young as five months have the hierarchical retinotopic organization of the mature adult visual system. This suggests that incoming visual information undergoes a cascade of transformations to extract features of differing complexity, even at a young age.

Research highlights:

Ellis, C. T.,Yates, T. S., Skalaban, L. J., Bejjanki, V. R., Arcaro, M. J., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2021). Retinotopic organization of visual cortex in human infants. Neuron, 109, 1-11. PaperCodeData

Ellis, C. T., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2019). Complexity can facilitate visual and auditory perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45(9), 1271-1284. PaperData

Methods

In the last 20 years, neuroimaging methods like electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have made strides in providing new measures of infant cognition. Yet, task-based fMRI has not made the same progress. Indeed, fMRI’s value might be greater in infants than adults, given that there are so few options for assessing the mind in infants. We strive to push forward methods for conducting fMRI with awake, behaving infants. As part of this effort, I have published a protocol for collecting large quantities of high-quality data from infants and released the data and software associated with this project.

Beyond infant fMRI, our team aims to push the limits of what information can be found in brain data. We also seek to disseminate these findings broadly and create pedagogical materials for the democratization of these methods.

Research highlights:

Ellis, C. T., Skalaban, L. J., Yates, T. S., Bejjanki, V. R., Córdova, N. I., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2020). Re-imagining fMRI for awake behaving infants. Nature Communications, 114523. Paperexperiment_menu (display) codeinfant_neuropipe_(analysis) codeData

Ellis, C. T., Baldassano, C., Schapiro, A. C., Cai, M. B., Cohen, J. D. (2020). Facilitating open-science with realistic fMRI simulation: validation and application. PeerJ, 8, e8564. PaperCode

Ellis, C. T., Lesnick, M., Henselman-Petrusek, G., Keller, B., & Cohen, J. D. (2019). Feasibility of topological data analysis for event-related fMRI, Network Neuroscience(3), 695-706. PaperCode

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