|
 October
15, 2002
"This
is our very best room," Dr.
Adele Diamond says proudly, opening the door to the mother
of all waiting rooms. Primary colors assault the eyes. Marbles
make music tripping their way down a painted wooden spiral.
Five-year-old Thomas spills out the pieces to a foam puzzle
on the floor while his mother fills out a questionnaire. "Thomas,
pretend like you're kicking a soccer ball," she asks. The
boy stands up - grinning wickedly - and pantomimes a fierce
kick. "Thank you," his mother says, then mutters "Right foot,"
as she turns her attention back to the clipboard on her lap.
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Reading
Minds
Though he's perfectly healthy, Thomas is here to have his
brain scanned. He's one of 40 five- and eight-year-olds who
will visit Diamond's lab this week. A researcher at the Eunice
Kennedy Shriver Center at the University of Massachusetts
School of Medicine in Waltham, Diamond hopes her experiment
will help refine the art of reading little kids' minds.
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Diamond hopes her experiment will help refine the art
of reading little kids' minds.
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As
we saw in "Why Kids
Don't Get It," Diamond studies the development of
children's frontal lobes, the part of the brain responsible
for higher cognitive tasks. Much of her work requires children
to perform cognitive tasks while lying still in an fMRI, or
functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. The resulting
snap-shot indicates which parts of the brain are active during
specific cognitive tasks.
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| Does
trying to lie still affect data from children's brain
scans? |
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But
Diamond wondered if the very act of remaining still -that
is, inhibiting all the wiggles and squirminess of youth- takes
such brain power that it affects the data from the fMRI. Additionally,
there's evidence that adults and children show some differences
in performing cognitive tasks depending on whether they are
upright or lying down. Diamond wonders if results obtained
from children lying down in an fMRI machine are similarly
affected. To get to the bottom of these questions, Diamond
- joined by Dr. Dennis Molfese, chair of the Developmental
Neuropsychology at the University of Louisville - will ask
Thomas and the 39 other boys and girls to play a computer
game.
Circles
and Stripes
"I have more computer games than my sister," Thomas tells
Eva Ratajczak one of Molfese's two undergraduate assistants,
as she leads him to the lab where the team has built a pretend
FMRI. Essentially a doctor's exam table placed in front of
a hole in a brightly painted wall, the mock-up doesn't look
much like the hi-tech medical instrument it's supposed to
be. But the lack of detail doesn't matter at all to Thomas,
whom lab assistant Jamie Wilson plunks down on the table in
front of a computer screen. She also hands him a control box
with two buttons.
The
screen shows Thomas two kinds of circles, solid gray ones
and striped ones. Circles of both types may appear on either
the right or left side of the computer screen. When Thomas
sees solid gray circles, he is supposed to click the button
on the corresponding side of his control box. When Thomas
sees striped circles, he is to click the button on the opposite
side of the control box.
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| The
electrodes in this cap will measure Thomas' brain waves
during the experiment. |
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After
minimal coaching and heaps of motivational praise, Thomas
is clicking away, making hardly any mistakes. But this is
only a warm up. Once the researchers are confident Thomas
understands the rules of this new game, the real testing begins.
Wilson and Ratajczak guide Thomas into a prep room where they
cover him in a smock then attach a cap of electrodes to his
head.
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"You see the same cognitive changes in babies in all
different circumstances; Babies with multiple caregivers,
babies with one caregiver, babies from poor families,
rich families, American babies, African babies- it doesn't
matter."
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Crowned
with real electrodes, Thomas returns to the room with the
mock fMRI. He plays the computer game three more times- once
sitting, once lying in the mock MRI, and once lying in the
machine while trying to remain perfectly still. During each
trial, the electrodes monitor his brain waves. Unlike a real
fMRI, the electrode cap won't reveal which parts of Thomas'
brain are involved in the task, but it will reveal differences
in the quality of the data obtained during the three separate
trials.
The trials take what seems like a long time for a five-year-old.
Indeed, Thomas does get at times fidgety, at other times dangerously
close to falling asleep, as indicated by the alpha waves scrolling
across the computer screen. At last- just under two hours
after he arrived - Thomas is leaving the lab, but not before
choosing a small reward from the lab's "supply closet," filled
with stickers, bean bag toys and other small objects.
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Images:
Diamond Lab
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