Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Measuring the neural correlates of cognition in freely moving preschoolers presents several challenges. The current article describes a proof-of-principle study assessing brain activation in preschoolers while performing a naturalistic action planning task in the wild. Ninety-two children between 3 and 5 years of age built both a Duplo house and a Duplo spaceship. Both building tasks involve the completion of multiple subgoals within the overall goal. The results revealed an increase in oxyhaemoglobin activation in right DLPFC when planning for the next subgoal, as well as in a standard go/no-go inhibition task, suggesting that inhibition may play a special role in selecting subgoals at these ages. More generally, we demonstrate that fNIRS data can be recorded from moving preschoolers and that a multi-modal set-up including optical motion capture can allow the reconstruction of events of interest. Implications of the approach, as well as recommendations to improve data quality of wireless fNIRS in freely moving toddlers, are discussed.