– I am interested in the role sleep might play in motor development. Sleep’s functions have been studied for centuries, but motor control and sleep have often been treated as separate topics, says Raud,
She is a postdoc at The Center for Lifespan Changes in Brain and Cognition (LCBC) at The Department of Psychology.
When the baby cracks the code
The Research Council of Norway (RCN) has just granted her a couple of FRIPRO millions, through the new programme Radical Research Ideas for Early Career Scientists, to further develop her project «From Sleep to Steps: Linking Sleep and Motor Control in Infant Development».
She will investigate this by looking at babies.They start life with almost no motor skills and then, within a year or two, learn a whole range of complex movements from reaching and grasping to sitting, crawling, and walking. And they do all that while sleeping a lot, often more than half the day, Raud points out.
– In this project we’re taking a first look at this link by recording electrical brain activity from 4 month old infants with EEG while also tracking their hand and leg movements.
Electrodes on head, hand and legs
Both electroencephalography (EEG) and motion tracking are safe, standard tools in developmental research, but the real challenge is getting recordings that are long enough to capture what happens during both wakefulness and sleep.
– If we succeed, we hope to relate movements during the wakefulness and sleep to specific bursts of brain activity, which could tell us how sleep shapes motor development, she says.
Ground-breaking
Liisa Raud was relieved, and a little nervous, when she got the good news.
– This is fantastic news for me, for LCBC, and for PSI. I’ve had this idea for a long time, but it’s been hard to get any support for it because nobody has really investigated it before.
She lauds the new FRIPRO programme, which fitted her idea so well. The programme for radical ideas welcomes projects with high risk and possible high reward, she states, and adds that the immediate goal is to show that this idea has merit and then lay the groundwork for a larger follow up project.
LCBC, where she works, already has a strong research track record on sleep and cognition, but most of that work has focused on young adults and ageing.
A lot of patience
– We also have considerable experience with developmental topics, but we have not previously carried out experimental, sleep focused studies in infants.
Raud appreciates that there already is a good infrastructure for brain research at PSI. There are several research groups investigating cognition in infants.
– I’m excited to have time and resources to get going, but I also know it’s an ambitious, hands-on project, so I’m mentally preparing for a lot of lab work and long hours to make it succeed, she aknowledges.
The seed to something great
– The grant is, above all, very gratifying for the principal investigator and her research community, and of course also for the faculty. Congratulations! says Lars T. Westlye, Vice-Dean for Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences.
He points out that the Research Council of Norway’s focus on so-called radical research ideas makes it possible for early-career researchers to test new ideas that could lead to ground-breaking discoveries, but which at the time of application may not be sufficiently mature, or may be considered too risky to justify a full multi-year research project.
If the project succeeds, the Research Council has prepared for the PI to be able to submit an application and be prioritised in the competition for larger FRIPRO projects, Westlye explains, thereby providing an opportunity to pursue the same bold research questions on a larger scale.
– We will see many daring, ambitious and exciting projects here, right at the forefront of international research, and that certainly applies to Raud’s project on sleep and infant development.
– We look forward to following this project. The award bodes very well for the future of this exciting and active field of research, he concludes.