The mission of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development is to investigate relations between postnatal brain development and changes in perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic abilities from birth through childhood and late adulthood.
Research is intrinsically multidisciplinary and involves behavioural testing, ERP, fMRI, NIRS, and computational neural network modelling with typically and atypically developing children as well as adult patient populations.
- Find out what our different labs do
- Find out what individual researchers do
- Take a look at some of our recent publications
- Visit the website of the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings, our largest ongoing research project.
Want to join?
Do you have an infant and are interested in child development? Visit our Babylab pages and register to receive information about studies you could take part in.
If you have a child aged 2 - 18 years, you can also register to participate in studies we are running with older children.
If you would like to take part in our research with adults please sign up here.
Behavioural studies usually take up to 30 minutes and involve watching sequences of pictures or listening to sounds and making judgments about them. With such experiments we study the response time and accuracy of participants to clarify the cognitive processes (such as attention or working memory) involved in the task.
Many studies at the CBCD use EEG (electroencephalography). This is a safe and non-invasive method of studying brain electrical activity through a net of sensors placed on a participant's head. Each sensor sits on the scalp and registers the electrical activity from the active brain. This signal can then be processed to learn more about the pattern of brain activity during the experimental task, (for example judging the similarity of 2 pictures, or detecting previously unseen faces). This technique can be used to answer many different questions. How does the brain extract different bits of information about a face? What happens in the brain when you see a novel image? Do left and right hemispheres specialize in processing different kinds of information?