In 2001, Richard Aslin (University of Rochester, NY) and Jacques Mehler (SISSA, Trieste, Italy) initiated a series of planning meetings to explore new methods for studying infant cognitive and language development. Funding from the McDonnell Foundation (Infant looking: Methods used to assess cognitive development) enabled us to gather input from leaders in the field, with the goal of defining a set of key questions that would both refine current methods and develop new assessment tools. Five workshops were held in 2001-2003.
In 2003, a second round of funding from the McDonnell Foundation’s Bridging Brain, Mind, and Behavior program (Program Grant to Combine Methods for Assessing Cognitive Development in Human Infants and to Promote the Field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience) was awarded to a core group of investigators that emerged from the five planning workshops (Aslin, Csibra, Mehler, Nelson, Panneton, Richards, Werker), and in 2004 three additional investigators were added to the grant (Bertenthal, Johnson, von Hofsten). Based on further workshops, a series of cross-lab projects were planned and implemented, with a focus on traditional looking-time measures, eye-tracking, EEG/ERP, and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).