How do toddlers think? A new kind of brain scan is helping us find out

Technological advances imply that we are able to lastly sort out an age-old query: what is going on on within the minds of youngsters?

By Clare Wilson

THREE-year-old Sophie is sitting at a low desk, attempting to construct a home out of enormous plastic bricks, as a close-by grownup provides light encouragement. It could possibly be a scene from any nursery faculty, however for the incongruous equipment that Sophie wears: a snugly becoming black cap studded with sensors and sprouting a number of thick, black wires. It appears to be like barely sinister, however the innocent cap is letting researchers do one thing that has by no means been accomplished earlier than: peer contained in the brains of lively toddlers.

Sophie is a participant on the ToddlerLab, a state-of-the-art facility at Birkbeck College of London that’s investigating …