Nelson – scene: Nelson’s lab

There are several segments in this CD. The first segment is entitled Voice Recognition and here what you’re looking at is our testing of the newborn’s ability to discriminate mother’s voice from a stranger’s voice. So in the beginning what we’re doing is putting on electrodes, put on the baby’s head and then we place a small ear insert into the baby’s ear while the baby is in a light state of sleep. And then what the baby hears is their mother or a stranger saying a simple word like ‘hi baby’. So they hear ‘hi baby’ by mom and ‘hi baby’ by a stranger. And we present this about 100 times, maybe 50 times each and that entire time we’re recording the baby’s brain activity. And in one segment of the CD you can see on a blue screen the baby’s brain activity going up and down like that. And the goal of that work is not just to look at what are the neural systems involved in recognizing mom’s voice, but as well we’re looking at a clinical population of babies who we think have had damage to the part of the brain involved in memory who may not have benefited from the experience of hearing their mother’s voice and therefore may not recognize their mother’s voice at birth.  

Now in the next segment which is called Face Recognition.  What you see us doing there something comparable to what we saw in the newborn. This is a 6-month-old baby. We place a net of electrodes on the baby’s head and then what we’re doing is showing the baby pictures of faces and we want to know can they recognize a face they’ve seen before from a novel face. And so again we’re recording brain activity and again on the screen you can see a picture of the baby’s EEG. And the goal of that work is to look at the neuro correlates involved in discriminating one phase from another phase.  

This is an older child. This is a 4-year-old entitled Emotion Recognition. Again we’re recording brain activity except this time we’re showing the child different pictures of facial expressions and we want to know, a. does their brain activity show that they can discriminate one expression from another, and b. does their brain show unique patterns of brain activity to some expressions rather than others. For example in some of our earlier work we demonstrated that anger expressions show a particular aspect of changes in brain activity that we don’t see with other facial emotions. So the goal of that work is to look at the neuro correlates of recognizing emotion.  

And finally in the last segment entitled FMRI we’re showing how we actually conduct functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. This is an 8-year-old child where she’s brought into the scanner room and you can see what the tunnel looks like, the scanner. She hops up on the bed which goes up and then the child slides into the tunnel and then she’s given a button box and what happens is that on the screen in front of her we’re showing different patterns and she has to push a button that corresponds to which pattern she’s seen before and which is novel. And so all she’s doing is pushing a button that corresponds to whether she’s seen one of those patterns before and which one she hasn’t seen before. And during that entire time we’re taking very detailed pictures of her brain. So we’ll know precisely what part of the brain was involved in performing our task. And that whole test will take about 20 minutes.