Courses
Courses
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From the many age ranges targeted by Developmental Neurosciences, LulLABy focuses mainly on early development, i.e., the stages of life before children start talking: newborns (up to 30 days), infants (0-1 years) and toddlers (1-2 years).
Early
development
Congenital blindness is one case of atypical development which exemplifies the brain's extraordinary plasticity. Brain plasticity allows reorganization and this reorganization is particularly evident when blind people read braille, a form of reading which recruits touch rather than sight and which activates brain regions that are typically associated with language in sighted people.
Atypical
development
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Lifespan development
Lifespan development explores how we change and grow from conception to death. With the same logic, in Developmental Neurosciences, the brain is viewed as evolving in a lifelong process and this process can be studied systematically in order to better understand how a brain function such as vision or face perception takes place in the human brain.
Brain plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity, refers to the brain's ability to change and adapt to the environment as a result of experience. Developmental neurosciences points to plasticity as the key mechanism involved in maturation, the change in brain functions with age and the assessment of neurocognitive functions at multiple time points.
Brain
plasticity
The brain constantly receives vast amounts of information from its surroundings which have to be efficiently and rapidly integrated. This is particularly the case for faces (vision), which have to be associated with their auditory counterparts, i.e., voices (audition). Both stimuli recruit dedicated brain regions whose activation depends on the type and the complexity of the input. Faces, for example, recruit regions along the ventral visual stream and activate predominantly the right hemisphere.
(Audio)
vision
Faces
and other stimuli
Face processing is essential to adequately respond to the environment from an early age (e.g., interact, fight, seek protection). Faces are composed of different features such as an identity and an emotional content, which are merged automatically into a coherent whole by a neural system that shows plasticity until late adolescence.
Do infants show curiosity despite they cannot talk? Original methodological artifices demonstrate that infants do but only if they are tested under uncertain experimental conditions where they have to choose between exploring or exploiting an object.
Early
curiosity
How does the brain produces conscious experience and what are the neural bases to subliminal processes? These complex but fundamental questions can be investigated via EEG and its frequency and temporal outputs analysed at an individual level.