Developing Brains – BioQuakes

A research team at the University of Iowa has identified a brain wave (P3) that is associated with aggressive tendencies in toddlers.

Brain Monitor Head Set

What does this mean?
Researchers used a sample of 153 toddlers between the ages of 2.5 – 3.5, of whom had individual sessions in which they wore a net of head sensors to mark brain activity while hearing different pitches sounded throughout the room. The noise of the tones occurred while the toddlers watched silent cartoons.

Each pitch change during the toddlers’ session exemplified a change in the environment. This “testing” corresponds with most changes within a setting, and is particularly similar to a transitional phase in a social interaction. It is important to note that the brains of aggressive kids are usually unable to successfully detect a change in the tone of a person they are interacting with. For example, while one neutral kid may be playfully making fun of another, the aggressive kid might interpret that as bullying and will respond with hostility.

When evaluating the head sensors, researchers found that “toddlers who had smaller spikes in the P3 brain wave when confronted with a situational change were more aggressive than children registering larger P3 brain-wave peaks,” as cited in the Science Daily.

Why is this important?

This finding in research will allow for earlier interventions in stopping aggressive impulses in toddlers, which is usually a tendency that continues throughout their adolescence. When confronting aggressive behaviors at an older age, it is harder to treat and dispose of combative traits that are instilled within a child’s demeanor.

As someone who has worked with kids with special needs of ages 4-10, I have watched kids grow up and continuously get more aggressive as they age. Although it is hard to combat these tendencies at the age of 4, it is easier to help them better react to social interactions they do not understand at 4 years old rather than at 10 years old. Therefore, in helping parents recognize key behavioral issues with their children at the young age of 2, this brain wave scanning of P3 will allow said parents to find new ways to decrease the aggressive behaviors their child will exhibit.

However, I am unsure whether or not this will become a routine thing doctors check for in toddlers, or how much it will cost. Do you think it is necessary for parents to know this information? If you were a parent, would you want your child to go under this “testing?”

Everyone learns to speak one language from their parents when they are young. But when they get older they have to take classes to relearn a second language. This isn’t easy and people spend most of their elementary school life trying to learn the basics. Learning a second language in today’s world is very useful because so many people travel to different countries for business and there is not one main language yet. The question of should parents teach their children two languages when they are babies or shouldn’t they has been a question for a long time. The trouble is that it is very hard to see when babies actually start learning to understand languages. Antoher worry with teaching babies two languages is that they will become confused with both languages. Researchers have begun to use Electroencephalography (EEG) on babies to see if their brains were even recongnizing words from different languages.

In a recent New York Times article, one group of researchers from the University of Washington used babies between the ages of 6 and 12 months from both monolingual and bilingual families. They found that all monolingual babies were able to recognize different phonetic sounds regardless of what language it was. But the monolingual babies who were 10 to 12 months old only registered sounds from the language spoken at home and had no recognition of the second language. The bilingual babies recognized sounds from both languages but couldn’t differentiate between them from ages 6 to 9 months, but from 10 to 12 months old the bilingual babies were able to discriminate sounds from both languages. In a different recent study researches from the University of British Columbia studied newborn babies and found that newborn babies had preferences for whatever language or languages their mothers spoke while pregnant. Other research has shown that bilingual babies are also able to “learn different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking.”

So if you ever have a baby, make sure that you expose it to two languages to make it an adorable genius!

BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Tag: Developing Brains

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