Chapter 10: Studying Young Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Development With ERP Methodology

In recent years, there has been a knowledge explosion about the structures and processes of brain development in infants and young children. This increased interest in and knowledge about young children’s brain development has been promoted partly because techniques for studying children’s brain activity have continued to progress and become more commonly used. One promising research method is focused on studying the Event Related Potential (ERP), which measures the electrical activity of the brain when various stimuli events are presented. The emergence of such focused electrophysiological brain imaging has provided information about a variety of cognitive and social-emotional processes in young children, such as attention, memory, social-emotional regulation, executive functioning, metacognition, language, and early academic development. At one time, measures of brain wave activity involved more laborious techniques and thus, were not used as often with young children. However, with the development in the 1970s of various types of “caps” that could be used more easily, ERP studies of developmental topics with young children have shown a steady increase. Recent issues of journals related to child development and/or early education now typically include at least a few articles that report results gained from ERP studies.