ERC Synergy grant awarded to Ole Jensen, Sarang Dalal and Xavier De Tiège
€13.6 million to discover when the brain becomes ready for language and social understanding
Neuroscientists Ole Jensen, Xavier De Tiège and Sarang Dalal have been awarded a €13.6 million European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant to investigate how the developing brain acquires the foundations of language and social understanding. Their six-year project, COG-MAT (Tracking Early Cognitive Maturation), will follow brain development from the womb to school age.
The central hypothesis is that the young brain processes information relatively slowly. As neural connections mature, faster and better-coordinated brain activity may enable children to understand speech, recognise emotions and interact with others. The researchers will test this idea using a new technology based on optically pumped magnetometer magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG): quiet, non-invasive magnetic sensors adaptable to a pregnant abdomen, an infant or a child’s head.
Across research sites in the UK, Belgium and Denmark, the team plans around 750 recordings at five stages: before birth, 3–4 months, 30 months, four years and eight years. Early measurements will be linked to later language and social abilities; research at school age will also examine autism and reading difficulties. The aim is to establish brain-based developmental benchmarks, not a clinical diagnostic test.
“We want to understand when the brain becomes ready for the skills that define human communication,” says Ole Jensen, professor at the University of Oxford. “For the first time, these sensors let us investigate the neural foundations of those abilities from before birth through childhood.”
Jensen brings expertise in cognitive neuroscience; Sarang Dalal (Aarhus University) leads the sensor technology and analysis; and Xavier De Tiège (Université libre de Bruxelles) contributes developmental and clinical neuroimaging. Together they aim to make methods and appropriately protected research data available to the wider scientific community.
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