Understanding Light and Cognition in the Late Preterm Fetus Version 01
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding Light and Cognition in the Late Preterm Fetus: Proof of Concept for Social Research Techniques
IRAS ID
145255
Contact name
Vincent Reid
Contact email
Research summary
Recently it has been determined that the human fetus lives in an environment which is not dark. This project seeks to understand how human fetuses respond to aspects of the world related to social information. The aim of this project is to send light to the fetus. Within that light, we will present various shapes. A human fetus will never have seen detailed shapes. When a baby is born, she will look at faces more than any other form of visual stimulus, detect differences in small number sets and match mouth movement to simple speech sounds. We aim to understand if this is something learned quickly after birth, or if human genes mean we look at faces more than anything else.
Before we do this, we will need to understand how light moves through skin, muscle and fat. We want the light to be the same for all fetuses, which means we need to create a device that can take into account these factors for every individual mother and fetus.
Investigating how human fetuses understand things before they are born will tell us about the relationship between early learning and the environment. This work may also tell us how the understanding of social information related to other people changes in early development.
This project has potential impacts and benefits related to our understanding of early learning. This has implications for our understanding of the development of different forms of developmental disorders that have a social deficit, such as autism. This is because the ability to process aspects of social information is often impaired in those diagnosed with autism. Therefore, in order to map the parameters of autism, we first need to understand how these systems work in typically developing populations, including the role of the environment for early learning.
REC name
North West - Preston Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/NW/1022
Date of REC Opinion
2 Jul 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion