August 2026 News

International Congress of Infant Studies and Fetal, Infant, Toddler Neuroimaging Group Meetings 
Members of the Cusack Lab travelled to Panama City, Panama, to attend the biannual International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) meeting and the Fetal, Infant, Toddler Neuroimaging Group (FIT'NG) meeting. At ICIS, Prof. Rhodri Cusack contributed to the symposium Lessons from AI for Infant Learning with his talk, Learning Foundational Representations in Early Infancy: Insights from Neuroimaging and Artificial Intelligence, exploring how neuroimaging and AI can provide insights into the development of foundational representations in early infancy. At FIT'NG, Prof. Rhodri Cusack was the keynote speaker, presenting What Can Infants See? A NeuroAI Lens on Development of the Ventral Visual Stream and Medial Temporal Lobe, exploring how changes in the ventral visual stream and medial temporal lobe contribute to perception in infancy. Marie Santillo presented posters at both conferences, sharing new work investigating the development of visual memorability in early infancy. Together, the two meetings provided a fantastic opportunity for the lab to share our research, exchange ideas, and connect with researchers across the international infant neuroscience community.

All-Island Computational Neuroscience Symposium 
Dr. Áine T. Dineen was invited to speak at the All-Island Computational Neuroscience Symposium in Dublin, Ireland.
Her presentation, Awake Infant fMRI and Developmentally Inspired Deep Neural Networks Reveal the Development of Coarse and Fine Feature Tuning in Infant Visual Cortex, combined infant neuroimaging with computational modelling to investigate the development of visual representations. 

Prof. Rhodri Cusack Wins Prestigious ERC Advanced Grant
We are delighted to announce that Prof. Rhodri Cusack has been awarded a prestigious €3.5 million European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant! The grant will support research investigating how human infants learn to understand the visual world during their first year of life, including how they learn to recognise people, objects, relationships, and actions from the rich sensory information around them. Congratulations to Prof. Cusack on this fantastic achievement! We are incredibly excited to continue exploring how infants learn to understand the world around them. ​