PaL Lab post-doc and BabyPaL lead Ellie has published a new paper from her PhD looking at infant brain responses during free play. Traditional artificial play paradigms may not relate to reality, and hence Ellie and the team wanted to see how much insight an entirely naturalistic unconstrained interaction might provide into the development of social interaction. By measuring spontaneous EEG in 6 month old little scientists (babies) while they freely interacted with their mothers, the authors found oscillatory changes in the alpha and theta bands. Overall, the authors suggested that paradigms forming a hybrid between artificial play and naturalistic interaction may hold the key to understanding the development of social interaction. Read the paper here!
