A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can’t tell us.
This is…interesting. (And the photo of the wired-up baby is a little creepy.) I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently around a baby (and a toddler), and I’m not 100% sure I agree with their police work there, Lou. What does “perceive objects in an adult-like way” mean, exactly? Because the baby I’ve been hanging with doesn’t seem to understand adult-like concepts like “you can’t go through a solid object”.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She is, after all, a baby. At least we haven’t had to have the conversation about how riding the dog like it’s a small horse is FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.)
Charles Nelson, director of developmental medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, cautioned that the French scientists may be over-interpreting data…
Brain wave data and brain activity measured by functional MRI scans alone cannot imply a behavioral state, Nelson warned.
“If that were true, I should be able to look at your [electroencephalogram and MRI] response and know what you’re thinking or feeling, and we know that is not the case,” he said.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 20th, 2013 at 9:25 am and is filed under Clippings, Neuroscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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