BETTER STILL: Using a decommissioned MRI machine, 4-year-old Mason Ray, of Penfield, NY, trains for the real thing before entering a study that will use an actual fMRI machine.PHOTO BY J. ADAM FENSTER, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTERThere’s one obvious trick to getting a good picture of brain activity from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan: hold still. Adults are generally capable of following this crucial rule, but children typically find this constraint more difficult. That is, unless they’re watching their favorite TV program.
Between 2009 and 2011, cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon invited 27 children to come to her lab at the University of Rochester in upstate New York to watch a 20-minute segment of Sesame Street, with clips on math, reading, life, and more. The only catch was that the children, aged 4 to 11 years, had to watch this show inside of the big “space ship”—and they had to hold still.
No problem. After a trial run in a fake scanner, the participants came back for the real thing and wiggled much less than children in previous fMRI studies that had used more traditional stimuli, like images of letters or numbers. “The motion scores that we got off of this task, of watching Sesame Street, are way ...
