Babies' awareness seen blossoming

• Autores: Douglas Heaven
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2914, 2013, pág. 16
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The human brain develops dramatically in the first year of life, transforming a baby from being unaware to fully engaged with its surroundings. To capture this change, Sid Kouider at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France, and colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical signals in the brains of 80 very young children. Kouider's team put EEG caps on babies aged 5, 12 and 15 months, recording brain activity as they were shown rapidly changing images. Most of these were of random ovals, but among them was a face. Each group responded to the face with the two-stage pattern of brain activity. But the second stage took much longer to reach in 5-month-old babies than in the older groups. In 12 and 15-month-old babies the second stage arrived 800 to 900 milliseconds after the face was displayed. In the youngest infants, there was a delay of about 1,200 milliseconds.