Rebecca Saxe, PhD

John W Jarve (1978) Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Associate Dean of Science

MIT

Getting started: Imaging the minds and brains of human infants

In this talk, I will describe my lab’s efforts to advance knowledge of the minds of infants, through neuroimaging of the activity in their brains. One part of the talk will review our evidence that responses to social stimuli (dynamic faces) arise in many parts of cortex simultaneously and early in infancy. Based on this evidence, I’ll argue that infants’ learning about, and representations of, other people are not just a downstream consequence of generic processes that promote learning in the nonsocial environment, nor are they built by gradual, bottom-up adjustment to the statistics of visual experience.  On the contrary, infants’ attention to people depends on specific inferences about their social relevance.  Another part of the talk will reflect on this whole approach.  Our fMRI results reveal that the functions of cortical regions are quite similar, between infants and adults. Indeed, as the methods in our field improve, some initial differences have disappeared, turning into similarities. But, these mounting similarities can’t be the whole story: brains are machines for learning, and infants have a lot to learn to acquire adult minds. So, I will consider where we might look next for signatures of developmental change in infants minds and brains.

Host(s): Nim Tottenham (Faculty) and Anna Vannucci (Graduate Student)

Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

This event will be in-person only and will not offer a Zoom option.
Open only to Columbia University and Columbia University Affiliates.
Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, 9th Floor Lecture Hall    
Live-stream Location: CUIMC, Neurological Institute First Floor Auditorium 

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and are either external to Columbia (Columbia Neuroscience Seminars and Special Seminars) or are Columbia faculty members (Local Circuits) invited through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.