In infants, source localization is even more difficult. The Nc was most prominent at the fronto-central sensors, which coincides with the location of the anterior fontanel. The fontanel is known to produce inhomogeneity in skull conductivity in infants, which causes EEG signals to be distorted (Flemming et al. 2005; Roche-Labarbe et al. 2008; Reynolds and Richards 2009). Because the fronto-central sensors cover the part at which the skull is not closed yet, it is likely that the activity is strongest at this location, regardless of where

the signal was generated. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Therefore, we cannot make any claims on the underlying neural generators in infants. Our findings are in line with previous research showing that changes in object

location and in object identity are detected early in life (Wilcox and Schweinle 2002; Káldy and Leslie 2003, 2005; Oakes et al. 2006). The Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical lack of conscious detection of the switch could be due to the maturation of the brain mechanisms involved in binding object location to object identity. In adults, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that feature-location binding is dependent on the Selleckchem Vorinostat hippocampus (Piekema et al. 2006; Hannula and Ranganath 2008). The hippocampus is a brain structure subject Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to protracted Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical development throughout childhood (Gogtay et al. 2006; Lavenex and Banta Lavenex 2013). Our finding that object location and object identity, but not a switch of two objects is consciously detected could be due to the immaturity of the hippocampus. Alternatively, it is also possible that 12-month-olds Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical are capable of binding multiple objects to their respective locations, but that they were unable to do so in our experiment as a result of the rapid

presentation of the scenes. It is possible, that given more time, infants would show evidence of feature-binding of multiple objects within an environment. Therefore, more research is needed to clarify the development of the hippocampus and its role in object-location binding in infants, as well as the effect of speeded presentation on object-location binding processes in infants. To Phosphoprotein phosphatase conclude, this study is the first to cohesively show that 12-month-old infants are capable of rapidly processing changes in objects and changes in location when objects are presented in a contextually rich environment. The use of EEG enabled us to demonstrate that they show increased attention based on initial change detection amazingly fast, already within 300 msec. In addition, we have shown that they consciously process object changes and location changes further to strengthen their memory representations.