For this project, Event Related Potentials are used to monitor brain activity in infant participants every two months from the ages of 4-months through 12-months. Two tests are done at each session. The first test consists of having infants watch pictures on a video monitor of their mothers face and a strangers face. For the second test, infants watch pictures of their favorite toy (which has been brought in from home and digitally captured for presentation) and a novel toy. This project aims to understand the underlying processes of memory as they are used in detecting a familiar and a novel stimulus. Because this study is longitudinal we are also interested in how these processes may change with development.
At the 6 and 8-month sessions a short behavioral test is also done in which infants looking time to two different stimuli is recorded. The infants are first familiarized to a …