Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield, an assistant professor in Developmental and Neuroscience, at Loyola University of Chicago is all for studying the development in children and finding ways that is more accurate to do so. Dr. Wakefield presented the struggles of studying children: 1. They don't always understand the task that was instructed to do 2. They are very squirmy, and that becomes difficult when using fMRI scanners or EEG since both are sensitive to movement 3. Their parents. This one is a huge barrier to doing research with children. Often times their parents are concerned about radiation from the machines that will be used. I'm here to tell you, there is no radiation, it is safe, and it is an expensive but useful tool in studying the brain development in children and can lead to important finding that may help us with diagnosis diseases prior to onset.
Dr. Wakefield's area of study is, "How children and adults learn, generalize and retain information learned through action and gesture; how this differs based on an individual’s ability to interpret movement as meaningful; how this differs based on whether action and gesture are performed by a learner or teacher." Which is pretty cool, studying whether it is better to yourself do a gesture while learning or just seeing the gesture over and over. She and others in this field have noted that, if the learner has done the gesture before and then during a test hears the word, their motor cortex will activate as if they are the ones doing the motion. It would be pretty awesome if we could learn exactly how at different stages in development children are learning but we can only do this if parents are willing and children are cooperative.
In 2016 Current Psychiatry published an article titled "Neuroimaging in children and adolescents: When do you scan? to inform the public about what each type of method of research can do. Neuroimaging when it was new was restricted to identifying structures in the brain , now it is being used for research and diagnosis, and there are many different types of imaging that can be done : CT, MRI, fMRI, and more. CT is less done with children but is the one that contains ionized radiation, but is used in emergency settings, more often with children MRI and fMRI are used, an MRI produces an image of the brain and is not using any type of radiation, it is completely safe, an fMRI is almost the same thing but it can show which areas of the brain are active by using the BOLD signal, this is the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent signal, if the brain is using oxygen that is correlated to that areas function.
Now wouldn’t it be interesting to use this type of accurate imaging to see what effect technology is having on development? In a piece written in Time magazine: It's Official: iPads Are Sedatives for Kids, the effect of iPads on behavior was explored. They reported that a team in Hong Kong compared children’s behavior when using an iPad to people taking a sedative. They measured the children’s anxiety levels throughout the day and compared the results. It was found that they had the same levels, which is really terrible in an everyday sense, giving your child an iPad is giving your child drugs. The group in Hong Kong did have a positive answer, that instead of giving children drugs before surgery they can give them an iPad beforehand. Hopefully in years to come neuroimaging will be done on children at different stages in development to track the alterations in the brain, if any, due to iPads and other technology. A lot of research is yet to be done in the developmental field and it is exciting to see that it is becoming more accessible, hopefully one day it will be more affordable as well as parents more educated about the benefits of the studies and that they are not harming the children, just gathering information.
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