Читать книгу Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence - Laura E. Levine - Страница 147

Some questions can best be answered by examining the body’s response to different stimuli. A number of physiological measures help us get those answers. Table 2.4 summarizes some of the measures used and what they indicate.

Table 2.4

Sources: Dupler (2014), Sowden and Barrett (2006), UC San Diego Center for Functional MRI (2016).

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MRIs and fMRIs. The MRI image (left) shows pictures of successive sections through the brain from the back to the front. The fMRI image (right) shows where the blood is flowing through the brain when the person thinks about an activity and actually does that activity.

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By using physiological measures, researchers have been able to understand more about the processes that underlie certain behaviors. For example, fMRI has been used to examine normal developmental changes in how the brain functions (Long, Benischek, Dewey, & Lebel, 2017). These findings will help us understand what happens when brain development results in conditions such as ADHD and autism. Research using fMRIs to scan the brains of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder has found that the part of the brain that controls face recognition is underactive in these children (Lynn et al., 2016). As you may know, children with autism often do not make eye contact with others and show little or no interest in social relationships. You will learn more about how autism spectrum disorder can be diagnosed in infants and how it is expressed in young children in Chapters 5 and 8.

Because physiological measures enable us to measure what is going on inside an individual without needing to rely on verbal communication, they have been particularly important in research involving infants and young children who can’t understand or answer questions because they either are not yet verbal or their language ability is limited. Another advantage is that physiological responses are not under the conscious control of the individual, so they cannot easily be faked or presented in a way intended to make them socially desirable (Blascovich, 2004). Also, most of these measures are noninvasive, meaning that nothing needs to be placed inside the body to collect the data. For instance, a type of cap with electrodes embedded in it can be used to record electrical brain activity with no discomfort to an infant who is wearing it.

Cortical measurement. This infant’s brain activity is being measured by means of a specially designed “electrode hat.” This noninvasive method of studying the brain has given us new insights into its functioning.

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