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we're mostly interested in
prenatal exposure to chemicals and how
that affects
the development of the brain and then
later the neural development
and cognitive and behavioral function of
the child
at a very basic level what we want to do
is try to develop
early tests that can look at really
basic sort of building blocks of
cognitive function like attention visual
attention especially
information processing speed and working
memory
so those are building blocks that are
just key
to most of the cognitive tasks that you
would try to do
and they tend to be stable within
individuals over time so that we hope by
measuring those early in development we
could get an indication of a continued
risk that might
exist if a chemical affects those
processes
the studies that we're doing now we're
looking at really young babies which is
very exciting for us but
they can't just tell us what they know
so we have to be creative and how we can
how we can figure out what they do know
so in babies we use looking behavior
we use an infrared eye tracker which can
very accurately track where they're
looking so we can
see which stimulus they're looking at
when they change the direction of their
look how long each fixation
is of their looking time and get really
precise
information and even as young as
four to five months of age you can see
differences in how babies
understand and look at the world and
solve problems
so for example to look at their
recognition memory
we'll first show them two identical
pictures side by side
and we'll give them a period of time to
study those faces so
they become familiarized with the face
and they get kind of bored with it after
a while
and then we'll show them that face
paired with a new novel face that they
haven't seen before
so the typical thing that a baby will do
is look at something novel that's how
they learn about their environment
so if they remember the face they've
seen before they should spend more time
looking at the novel face so
by looking at the looking time to the
novel face we can get a measure of their
recognition memory
we look at how many times they scan back
and forth or the shift rate and that
gives us
a measure of their visual attention and
then in terms of their information
processing speed we look at their actual
looking time what's the length of each
fixation and
how long it is before they habituate and
they just start looking away because
they're bored with
with the stimuli and what research and
psychology has shown is that
babies that have shorter looking times
very early in life
they habituate quicker tend to have
higher iq
and better executive functions later in
childhood so it really is a measure of
better cognitive performance it's a
technique that's been used in
developmental psychology for a long time
i mean we have to infer
and often you need to have
various controls in there to be sure
that you
you know what you have for example we've
found that babies
have a right side preference they tend
to they'll just tend to look to the
right
more than the left so you have to be
careful that you're not
just always showing the stimulus that's
novel for example on the right because
you could be measuring their side
preference
rather than their actual understanding
that it's a novel stimulus
so we have to take all kinds of things
like that into consideration
the percentage of children in our
country that have
some kind of a learning disability
or developmental disability is pretty
high
and we really don't know the cause for
most of this
chemical exposures could be contributing
and i think it's really important to try
to tease that out
this is something that could be
preventable right we could prevent
exposure if we know it's a risk
so we really want to do the relevant
research and
try to nail that down so that we can do
more to protect children's health
you