Posts tagged children
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Toys Cars Offer Mobility to Children with Disabilities
Children born with severe mobility impairments, such as those associated with cerebral palsy, are at increased risk for mobility-related developmental delays in cognition, language and socialization. Providing daily mobility between the ages of 1 and 5 is critical, given that significant learning, brain and behavioral development is dependent on mobility during this time.
The NSF-funded project, affectionately termed “Babies Driving Robots and Racecars,” began at the University of Delaware when Sunil Agrawal, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, approached Cole Galloway, a professor in the Department of Physical Therapy.
"Dr. Agrawal told me, ‘We have small robots, and you have small infants, do you think we can do something together?’" Galloway explained.
Galloway was hesitant at first; he could not envision babies and robots in the same room much less interacting with each other. However, after visiting the lab and seeing Agrawal’s robots in action, Galloway began to see the possibilities.
Kids who get migraine headaches are much more likely than other children to also have behavioral difficulties, including social and attention issues, and anxiety and depression. The more frequent the headaches, the greater the effect, according to research out now in the journal Cephalagia, published by SAGE.
Marco Arruda, director of the Glia Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, together with Marcelo Bigal of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York studied 1,856 Brazilian children aged 5 to 11. The authors say that this is the first large, community based study of its kind to look at how children’s behavioural and emotional symptoms correlate with migraine and tension-type headaches (TTH), and to incorporate data on headache frequency.
Thinking about others is not child’s play
August 9, 2012
MIT study reveals changes in brain activity as children learn to read other people’s behavior.
When you try to read other people’s thoughts, or guess why they are behaving a certain way, you employ a skill known as theory of mind. This skill, as measured by false-belief tests, takes time to develop: In children, it doesn’t start appearing until the age of 4 or 5.
Several years ago, MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe showed that in adults, theory of mind is seated in a specific brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Saxe and colleagues at MIT have now shown how brain activity in the TPJ changes as children learn to reason about others’ thoughts and feelings.
The findings suggest that the right TPJ becomes more specific to theory of mind as children age, taking on adult patterns of activity over time. The researchers also showed that the more selectively the right TPJ is activated when children listen to stories about other people’s thoughts, the better those children perform in tasks that require theory of mind.
The paper, published in the July 31 online edition of the journal Child Development, lays the groundwork for exploring theory-of-mind impairments in autistic children, says Hyowon Gweon, a graduate student in Saxe’s lab and lead author of the paper.
“Given that we know this is what typically developing kids show, the next question to ask is how it compares to autistic children who exhibit marked impairments in their ability to think about other people’s minds,” Gweon says. “Do they show differences from typically developing kids in their neural activity?”
Saxe, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is senior author of the Child Development paper. Other authors are Marina Bedny, a postdoc in Saxe’s lab, and David Dodell-Feder, a graduate student at Harvard University.