Current Studies

Movie-watching brain MRI study for 6-10 year olds

Functional MRI (fMRI) scans provide an important tool for researchers that study how children’s brains grow and change. In every fMRI study, all of the brains need to be lined up in a special way so that they can be properly compared to each other. Usually, the brains are lined up using physical landmarks, but a new method has been developed that uses functional information instead. This has worked really well in adult studies, and might be even more important in pediatric studies because of differences across brains that occur naturally during normal brain development. So, this study will test whether this new method (called hyperalignment) works in kids. To get enough data for the hyperalignment analyses, we will scan healthy children at BC Children’s Hospital while they watch movies in the MRI scanner, and we will repeat the scan on two different days.