The Nelson Lab

The McDonnell NIRS Consortium

*University of British Columbia--Infant Studies Centre, Vancouver, Canada
*University of Rochester--Rochester Baby Lab, Rochester, New York
*SISSA--The Language, Cognition, and Development Lab, Trieste, Italy
*Boston Children's Hospital--Division of Developmental Medicine, Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience

The McDonnell NIRS Consortium is an international organization of laboratories interested in developing the use of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) for the study of infant cognition. Our aim is to collectively use NIRS to study cognition in infants and children, as well as to compare our methods and analyses to improve the current NIRS technology.

Over the next several years, the project will focus on:

• The development of face perception and, in particular, the way that typically developing infants perceive faces as compared to objects. For more details, click here.
• The different ways in which infants born with cleft lip and/or cleft palate may process faces and language.
• The ways in which infant siblings of children with autism process faces, emotional cues, and native language. For more details click here.
• Introducing simultaneous NIRS and ERP studies for detailed temporal and spatial analysis of cognitive function in several of our ongoing studies.

Our collaboration to further the study of NIRS in infants was made possible in 2003 by the McDonnell Foundation’s Bridging Brain, Mind, and Behavior program (Program Grant to Combine Methods for Assessing Cognitive Development in Human Infants and to Promote the Field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience). Through the extension of collaborations, and continued meetings and workshops, we have developed several cross-lab projects and publications related to NIRS technology, and the use of this technique in conjunction with behavioral measures, eye-tracking, and EEG/ERP.