During my stay in Helsinki from February 2004 - June 2005, I recorded EEG and MEG in healthy newborns. Together with Minna Huotilainen and Elina Pihko, I assessed how attentive the neonate brain is. During spring 2008 (by the way, a beautiful time to visit Helsinki), we again recorded MEG in a total of 12 healthy newborns while presenting some consonant and dissonant sounds. This topic is important in music research and it still remains to be seen whether this type of stimulus processing in the brain is acquired during life or whether it is innate.
All infant studies were performed at the BioMag Laboratory of the Helsinki University Central Hospital.
I used the following tasks in my experiments:
1) Novelty oddball task (download pdf)
2) Multiple deviant paradigm (download pdf)
3) Continuous speech and singing (download pdf)
4) Consonant vs. dissonant sounds (still in progress)
The newborns were placed on a bed next to the MEG helmet in a magnetically shielded room. The MEG system was placed in supine position and the newborn was lying with the right hemisphere over the occipital part of the helmet. We, thus, only recorded brain activity from one hemisphere. Additionally, we placed a couple of EEG electrodes on the right side of the baby's head to determine the sleep stage. We recorded activity during both the quiet (very similar to the slow-wave sleep) and the active (similar to the REM-sleep) sleep.
If you are interested, you can have a look at some of the results of my work.
