STA(R)T TO LEARN: CALL FOR A 2-YEAR NON-DOCTORAL RESEARCHER AT THE ULB NEUROSCIENCE INSTITUTE

Project – Infants have the outstanding skill of being able to extract regularities in their environment. These statistical learning abilities are of the utmost importance since they form the basis of children’s capacities to organize and form coherent representations of the external world. The project STA(R)T TO LEARN will address three fundamental questions: (1) How these abilities develop in the first year of life, (2) how the constraints linked to cerebral maturation and to the infant’s experience with their environment interact with SL mechanisms, and (3) how prematurity impacts the development of these abilities. To answer these questions, electrophysiological and behavioural measures will be taken in full-term and preterm infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of (corrected) age, using a longitudinal approach. Electrophysiological recordings will use novel on-scalp magnetoencephalography based on optically pumped magnetometers. This project is funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS.

Work environment – STA(R)T TO LEARN will be conducted within the ULBabyLab, at the Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), and within the MEG unit of the Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN²T). Both labs are part of the ULB Neuroscience Institute (UNI). The LN²T is equipped with the neurophysiological facilities that will be used in the project, therefore most of the experimental work will take place there.