Developing near-infrared spectroscopy in combination with ERPs and fMRI to assess cognitive development in human infants and young children

The researchers plan to build off prior the conceptual foundation from earlier funding and to use it to develop the new technique of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for non-invasive imaging of the brain in infants and young children. NIRS employs an array of light sources on the scalp whose reflected light intensity from the cortex provides a localized measure of hemodynamics, similar to the BOLD signal used in fMRI. NIRS has poor temporal resolution but superior spatial localization. Yet NIRS, in contrast to MRI, does not place the infant in an acoustically noisy environment, does not require rigid head restraint, and does not expose infants to large magnetic fields. Although NIRS is limited to recording surface (2-3 cm) brain hemodynamics, whereas MRI can access the whole brain, the foregoing advantages of NIRS render it an extremely important new modality for infant brain imaging. The overall goal is to refine the NIRS technique, validate it using two well-established methods (Evoked Response Potentials and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), and conduct a series of key experiments on topics of crucial interest to researchers in the field of cognitive and language development.