Project description
New insights into early learning and brain function
Although brain imaging has revealed that newborns have complex brain structures similar to adults, we still lack a clear understanding of how infants process information and develop mental representations. The challenge is to uncover how young brains experience and learn from their environment as current knowledge about infant cognition is limited, particularly regarding the depth of their information processing. The ERC-funded BBThoughts project aims to address this by studying 3- to 4-month-old infants using high-density EEG and advanced methods such as eye-tracking and pupillometry. The project will investigate how infants manage information and conscious awareness, seeking to provide new insights into early learning and potential learning disabilities.
Objective
Understanding the initial architecture and learning algorithms of the human brain are central goals for cognitive neuroscience. Anatomical and functional brain-imaging studies have revealed that a complex brain architecture is already present at birth, including features associated with adult brains such as structural and functional asymmetries, long-distance connectivity and activations in prefrontal cortex. Despite such advances, little is known about the depth of information processing and the richness of mental representations in human infants. To address this issue, I propose to study the dynamics of information processing and conscious access in 34-month-old-infants. Using high-density EEG (128-280 channels), combined with new methodological approaches such as decoding, single-trial analyses of variability patterns, and new paradigms that monitor infants attention with frequency tagging, pupillometry and eye-tracking, I will separate infants short-lived, externally triggered versus sustained, internally driven responses and shed light on their roles in early learning.
WP1 will study whether the properties associated with conscious access in adults (ignition, top-down amplification, serial bottleneck) are already present in infants, and explore how ongoing neural activity, top-down expectations, and bottom-up stimulus features combine to modulate conscious access. WP2 will investigate the dynamics of acquisition and manipulation of symbolic representations. Experimental manipulations combined with fine-grained analysis of the temporal dynamics of EEG signals will clarify the time constants of infant cognition: how fast a stimulus enters perceptual awareness, how long attention can be maintained, how robust is this central representation to competing inputs, and how quickly it leads to stable learning. This project aims to enhance our understanding of early cognition, as well as provide new paradigms to shed light on early learning disabilities.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75794 Paris
France