Parents with very young babies are being asked to take part in research which could help in the treatment of autism. Researchers at Durham University hope that understanding how babies’ brains work will lead to earlier diagnosis and intervention.
They need babies from eight to 12 weeks of age to take part in the tests. The babies are not being tested for autism, they are being monitored to give researchers a better understanding of how babies learn.
We are not doing any medical testing in this study but purely looking at babies’ brains from an academic point of view. We don’t yet know enough about how the brains of very young babies develop and how they react to things.
More learning about the world takes place during infancy than at any other time in development and understanding how exactly this takes place is critical.