Last week I attended the biennial conference of the Society for Research in Child Development where I heard some of the latest research findings.

In my MGOL trainings, I mention some studies that show how infants are preprogrammed to connect with their parents. A poster from the University of Denver presented by Andrew Erhart describes “infant’s brain response to mother’s voice.”  His conclusion adds more aspects to the preprogramming” “This research demonstrates that infants show a neural preference towards mother’s voice and respond differently to different emotional prosody across a variety of brain areas.”  In addition, “this research shows that increased socioemotional development is associated with increased activation to mother’s voice (particularly happy voice) in areas of the brain responsible for social and emotion information processing in adults.

Look at poster by clicking on this link:  SRCD_infant_voice.

I also had the wonderful opportunity to hear Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman speak about the follow-up research to the Perry HighScope Preschool Project.  I’m writing a column on the conference for Children and Libraries, so I don’t want to give away all the details.  But it was fascinating!

Here are a few more posters: Priase, Enjoyment, & high expectations_ Sarah Pepper SRCD_infant_voice

Priase, Enjoyment, & high expectations_ Sarah Pepper