Scientists are using brain scans of kids and adults watching a children’s television series, to learn how kids’ neural change as they develop intellectual abilities like reading and maths.

The novel use of brain imaging during everyday activities like watching TV, said scientists, opens the door to studying other thought processes in naturalistic settings and may one day help to diagnose and treat learning disabilities.

Scientists are just beginning to use brain imaging to understand how humans’ process thought during real-life experiences.

“But this is the first study to use the method as a tool for understanding development,” said lead researcher Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

Eventually, that understanding may help pinpoint the cause when a child experiences difficulties mastering school work.

“Psychologists have behavioural tests for trying to get the bottom of learning impairments, but these new imaging studies provide a totally independent source of information about children’s learning based on what’s happening in the brain,” Cantlon said in a statement.

For the investigation, 27 children between the ages of 4 and 11, and 20 adults watched the same 20-minute Sesame Street video.

Like the regular programme, the recording featured a variety of short clips focused on numbers, words, shapes, and other subjects. The children then took standardised IQ tests for math and verbal ability.

To capture the neural response to the show, the researchers turned to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

The study produced 609 scans of each participant, one every two seconds, as they watched Big Bird, the Count, Elmo and other stars of the educational series.

Using statistical algorithms, the researchers then created “neural maps” of the thought processes for the children and the adults and compared the groups.

The study found that children whose neural maps more closely resembled the neural maps of adults scored higher on standardised math and verbal tests.

In other words, the brain’s neural structure, like other parts of the body, develops along predictable pathways as we mature.

The study also confirmed where in the brain these developing abilities are located. For verbal tasks, adult-like neural patterns in the Broca area, which is involved in speech and language, predicted higher verbal test scores in children.

For maths, better scores were linked to more mature patterns in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region of the brain known to be involved in the processing of numbers.

The study findings are published in the journal PLoS Biology.

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