The BLoCKS team went to Lancaster Conference on Infant & Early Child Development 2025

Last week, the BLoCKS team packed our bags and headed to the Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development 2025. We spent two days catching up with colleagues from across the globe to hear about their latest work in infant developmental science.

I was excited to give a talk at this conference, especially as I was presenting some of our new infant EEG decoding work for the first time, titled “Decoding infants’ existing category knowledge using EEG Multivariate Pattern Analysis”! Much of my work as part of BLoCKS is focused on developing techniques that can capture infants’ existing knowledge of object categories. We’re really interested in understanding the role that language in infants’ day-to-day life plays in their category learning, which means we need ways of capturing what objects they already have categories for!

In this work, with Teea and Marie Smith at Birkbeck, we showed 12-month-olds pictures of several examples of categories they should be familiar with (like bananas and balls) and several they aren’t familiar with (like padlocks and staplers). From this, we’ve been using machine learning approaches to EEG, known as Multivariate Pattern Analysis (which Grootswager et al. 2017 has a great paper on!), to train a classifier on infants’ activity associated with these categories to see if knowledge about a category is associated with distinct neural representations in infants’ brains. It was great to present some of our preliminary data using this technique!

My colleagues Jade and Barbara also presented some posters with exciting work from their PhDs exploring infants’ category learning. Barbara presented her work using head-mounted eye-tracking to explore how language shapes category learning in infants. Jade’s poster focused on how eye-tracking can reveal which object categories babies recognise early in life. I get to work with Jade day-to-day on this project, so it was brilliant to see her present this to people as excited about the findings as we are.

Thanks to the LCICD organisers for having us – look forward to attending another LCICD in the future! ](https://kelseyfrewin.github.io/blog/2025/lcicd/)