7. A new project led by @profsamwass.bsky.social records brain activity in babies and toddlers while they’re watching TV to find out. media.leverhulme.ac.uk/feature/swass

Those are just SOME of the reasons why sharing books is GREAT for young children’s brain development!

Full report here: www.booktrust.org.uk/about-us/rea...

Video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOry...

Structure: The frontal cortex, which helps join separate experiences into coherent goals, is slow to develop. Stories have structure. Regular story-telling may help to learn to understand about predictability and structure helping to learn to set goals. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Clarity: Hyper-articulating speech sounds
by exaggerating mouth movements helps young children to hear the differences between words. It also helps if your child can see your mouth while you’re talking. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01004.x

Rhythm: giving language input with a strong
rhythmic structure can help to nudge a child’s brain rhythms, which naturally are more irregular, into more stable adult-like rhythms, which helps language processing. doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...

Responsiveness: because children’s brains are messy, sometimes they’re ready for new information and sometimes they’re not. Waiting for them to initiate –by asking, looking or pointing – helps you to be sure that new info arrives when their brain is ready. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Repetition: young brains are messy and overconnected. When they want to read the same book over and over, or look at the same picture – go with it! Doing things repeatedly helps to ‘practice’ understanding something, which builds stronger brain networks. t.co/wssvev7XXG

…changing interpretation of multiple previous studies. Paper - hopefully a big eye opener!! - written with @EmilyDevNeuro, @JBegumAli, Mark Johnson and others. Pre-print here: biorxiv.org/content/bior... www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

This matters because it suggests that, for almost any study that used EEG to look at brain activity using non-event-locked paradigms, findings could be due to timing/geography of fine-grained eye movements, or brain differences time-locked to eye shifts… 7/8

Theta activity, often treated as a marker of engagement/attention (in our previous papers and tonnes others!) now suddenly looks like sum of transient fixation-related P1/N170 components. Eg data sections where no FRPs present show strongly attenuated oscillatory activity. 6/8

They are slower, which may drive developmental differences in frequency domain observed in previous resting state studies. FRPs also differentiate between social/non-social contexts, which may drive previously observed differences in frequency domain activity between contexts 5/8

These fixation-related potentials (FRPs) look very different in children compared with adults – more specific to particular frequency bands, etc – but a lot like evoked response potentials seen in passive, event-related paradigms. 4/8

Using co-registered eyetracking and EEG in 24-month-olds and adults we look at transient increases in cortical excitability time-locked to eye movements (~3/sec). We can clearly separate eye movement-related artifact and genuine neural activity linked to offset of saccade 3/8

The paper looks at how previous findings on changes in frequency-domain brain activity with age – eg changes in resting-state activity, ratio of theta/alpha between social/non-social viewing contexts etc - may be driven by transient changes during to micro-level eye movements2/8