Adélaïde de Heering Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Infants have long been considered as passive recipients mostly because they lack language and show a limited behavioral repertoire. The development of sophisticated and non-invasive electrophysiological (EEG) paradigms have however demonstrated that this was not true: human infants are, from very early on, equipped with elaborated cognitive abilities that can be tracked developmentally from very young ages. Among these electrophysiological paradigms are those relying on the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SS-EP) technique. The asset of this tool is to be capable of inducing a synchronization of the brain exactly at the frequency at which the observer is experiencing the stimuli, and to have this brain activity directly recordable at the surface of human scalp. Remarkably, this tool happens to be particularly adapted to test human infants. During this talk I will list the many advantages of the SS-EP tool when it is applied to infant populations, with the ultimate goal of highlighting how neural entrainment can help revealing neurocognitive development. More specifically, I will focus on a series of recent SS-EP experiments having been conducted on infants below the age of 1, which all convincingly demonstrate the extraordinary capacities of the infant brain. When vision is concerned, for example, it appears that the infant brain is already capable of creating a category from visual items that are very different from each other (e.g., faces). It also efficiently distinguishes these items from other items that do not belong to this category (e.g., objects).
