Baby Lab & Neonatal Neuroimaging Unit

CIMeC's Baby Lab and Neonatal Neuroimaging Unit (NNU) are two newly established laboratories dedicated to cognitive neuroscience research on infants and newborns performed with infant-friendly Electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioural studies. To learn about their activity please visit this web site.  Details about their equipment and publicly available resources are described here. 

I am responsible for the management and general operation of the Baby Lab and the NNU. Specifically, I am responsible for:

• • The choice, installation and maintenance of the EEG system and associated devices (stimuli presentation, video recordings etc.)

  • The daily operation of the EEG labs

  • EEG user training on experimental design, data acquisition and data analysis

Besides the daily lab management, I develop innovative experimental and data analysis tools tailored on the specific constraints of newborn and infant studies (limited attentional span, ambiguous attention, artefacts). Ongoing projects include:

• • Development of a semi-automatic algorithm for coding fixation times (i.e. time intervals when newborns/infants look at the stimulus) based on the tracking provided by the software DeepLabCut (collaboration with Davide Saretta, Mirko Zanon and Mathilde Josserand).

  • Implementation of EEG-anatomy co-registration via a 3D-scanner with newborn/infant EEG data for improved source reconstruction (collaboration with Sangyeob Baek, Massimo Vescovi and Giuliano Giari).

  • Development of methods of analysis tailored on newborn/infant EEG data for EEG artifact removal and analysis of neural responses in frequency-tagging paradigms. See the Methods section of the Research & Development page for more details.