THE DEVELOPING BRAIN AND MIND

Measuring the development of connections in the infant brain in the first year, using diffusion-weighted and functional connectivity MRI, and relating this to the development of brain function.

We have recently published a number of papers investigating the emergence of cognition

• A review in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Recruit and test infants online with Mechanical Turk!
• Measuring selectivity of infants at 3 and 9 months to the features of complex sounds

And, we have developed many methods for measuring brain function.

• Methodological challenges for longitudinal fMRI in infants
• Optimizing Stimulation and Analysis Protocols for Neonatal fMRI
• Differences in the spatial and temporal patterns of head motion during MRI of adults and infants
• Inter-subject regression, a new way to combine traditional fMRI analysis with model-free fMRI analysis

 

​With clinical collaborators, we are working to understand how brain function is disrupted by brain injury around the time of birth.

• Predicting motor impairments from functional connectivity in brain networks at birth
• Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Detect Preserved Function in a Preterm Infant with Brain Injury
• Affordable Cranial Ultrasonography in East African Neonatal Intensive Care Units

• Brainstem shape is affected by clinical course in the neonatal intensive care unit.​

Using multi-voxel pattern analysis to characterize the neural representation of "silent" thoughts, such as things we are remembering or imagining.