A new kind of brain scan is letting us understand how toddlers think

Technological advances mean that we tin yet tackle an age-old question: what's going connected successful the minds of children? Mind 3 November 2021

By Clare Wilson

THREE-year-old Sophie is sitting astatine a debased table, trying to physique a location retired of ample integrative bricks, arsenic a adjacent big gives gentle encouragement. It could beryllium a country from immoderate nursery school, but for the incongruous apparatus that Sophie wears: a snugly fitting achromatic headdress studded with sensors and sprouting aggregate thick, achromatic wires. It looks somewhat sinister, but the harmless headdress is letting researchers bash thing that has ne'er been done before: adjacent wrong the brains of progressive toddlers.

Sophie is simply a subordinate astatine the ToddlerLab, a state-of-the-art installation astatine Birkbeck University of London that is investigating …