Picture of the Week!

We will be posting fun pictures to keep you updated on the project. Below is a picture of a recent participant following complete EEG setup: 

How will measuring brain activity help us understand children’s thinking?

Children’s brains grow and change quickly.  These changes, influenced by a combination of biological makeup and life experiences, help children better understand and navigate their surroundings.  In particular, even brain activity involved in making simple decisions helps children learn, grown, and think more deeply about the world and their place in it.  In our study, we are looking at the links between brain activity involved in simple decision-making and more complex types of thinking.        

To study these links, we are using electroencephalogram, or EEG, recordings.  EEG measures naturally occurring electrical signals in the brain that contain information about what is going on inside and outside the body.  EEG is easy to measure and non-invasive, and you cannot feel it working.  It involves wearing an elastic “astronaut” cap that holds the sensors that measure the brain signals.  We use caps that have a lot of sensors in them so that we can get a full picture of the brain.  Here is a picture of what the setup looks like:

We hope that by studying children’s brain activity as they make simple decisions, we can better understand how children develop ways of thinking about what they know.

What are the goals of this project?

Over the first few years of elementary school, children’s thinking undergoes radical changes. Children start to think about information in different ways and they develop ideas about what they do or do not know. Two children who are the same age, even children in the same classroom, might have very different thoughts and feelings about their own knowledge.

The Mind, Attitudes, and Parenting (MAP) Project is studying how children think about what they know. Our goal is to better understand children’s thinking about their knowledge from a number of levels, including the influence of social experiences and the underlying brain processes involved. Our findings are not only intended to contribute to scientific knowledge, but also to help parents and educators better support children’s development.  
We are one of 18 research teams from around the world who are being funded by the Fuller Theological Seminary/Thrive Center in concert with the John Templeton Foundation to study different aspects of how people think about what they know.

On this blogger site, we will be sharing updates on our progress and providing links to interesting news articles and resources related to our project. We also welcome you to submit your questions about our project or children’s thinking more generally.