Flux 2020 - Poster presentation: Explaining brain research with children to children

Welcome to a poster on explaining brain research with children to children! First, I’d like you to ask yourself two questions. Why do you conduct research? Could you explain the purpose of your work to a scientist of another field, a grad student, a college student, a teenager, or even a six-year-old? Many scientists have difficulties in making their work accessible in an easily understandable way. Yet, bridging the gap between our “cognitive neuroscience world” and the general, non-scientific, public world is crucial. The more we talk about science to a variety of people, including the next generation of researchers, the more we create a society that understands what we do and why that is important. Very recently, the involvement of children and young people in so-called participatory action research, as researchers rather than merly subjects, has become increasingly popular.

While many issues that arise when aiming 00:59 - for participatory approaches are similar to those in adult research, those issues are often more pronounced in research with children. Children experience the world differently. They communicate differently. And we have an unequal power relationship between an adult researcher and a child participant. There are multiple things that we can do to allow children to take part as researchers. But we have to adequately deal with certain issues along the way. These issues might include methodological, practical, and ethical issues. Alterations can be made to all stages of research. In fact, we should aim to involve children already at the very early stages - such as during the development of research questions to ensure that research is of actual relevance to children. They might even give us novel ideas about research questions! We could also invite children to focus groups when planning a new study to hear their recommendations on task durations, acceptability of methods or training formats. Next, we should aim for child-friendly explanations of the research’s purpose and the task of the children.

In fact, a separate information package 02:09 - for parents and children and the flexible use of creative, child-friendly methods could ease understanding, participation and also increase motivation. Actually, we need their feedback to get to know how to increase their motivation and their assent to know if they really would like to participate. But what we should keep in mind is that the applicability of this approach and the specific methods depend on the subject at hand and differ between for example clinical work, behavioral and neuroimaging studies. We should always try to find a balance between the involvement of children as researchers and overburdening the child. And we must keep in mind that there are instances where we have to be the researcher or the therapist, and have to make decisions and take actions for the child.

Now, in the following I would like to 02:58 - demonstrate one example of a step towards participatory action research particularly for neuroscience. Because in the field of developmental neuroscience, involving children in participatory approaches requires as a first step an introduction of highly complex neuroscientific methods. We propose a way to teach children how a neuroscientific method works. As an example we introduce functional infrared spectroscopy, in short fNIRS. fNIRS is an optical imaging technique that we frequently use in our lab.

We created an animated, child- friendly video 03:32 - instruction that explains the principles of fNIRS and why we do fNIRS research. Such a video could be sent to families before participation to give children a better understanding of our neuroscientific method. Below you can see a short animation that explains the principles of light absorption and interference of brain activation though the difference in the amount of sent and received light by the fNIRS device. If you or your child would like to see the entire video and would like to know how fNIRS works you can click on this link. We hope you like it as much as we enjoyed creating it! Applying participatory action research methods, while taking care of potential issues that might arise, researchers can thus increase the empowerment of children and improve the quality and validity of their own work.

If you enjoyed our video and would like 04:22 - to see one more option of how to inform children about neuroscientific methods, you and maybe your child can read our pre-print article in which we describe fNIRS in a written form in a child-friendly manner to young researchers. Our kids article that is entitled “Shining light on the brain to understand how it works and to help children who face difficulties” can be found by clicking on this link. I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Thank you very much for visiting our poster and enjoy the rest of the conference! .