Hello from the Heartland. My name is Jenna, and this is Smarter News, news when it matters and why it matters.

Our Smarter series features unique people who help us think and live smarter.

You might have wondered once or twice what someone is actually registering when you speak to them.

And as a parent of three young children, I'm asking this question all the time. Turns out Princeton

University just completed a first of its kind study on just this, looking at the brain activity

of adults and children during

real-time interaction. Researchers call it a new frontier because very little is known about what a

child's brain is actually processing when we talk or play with them. As researcher, at least Piazza

explained, previous studies in this area often focus on adults

and can require a person to lay down and watch a movie or listen to a story during a brain

scan, something obviously a one-year-old would have trouble doing.

So the team at the Princeton Baby Lab, a research team focused on how children learn and

see the world, had to get creative with their

nine to 15-month-old participants utilizing state-of-the-art technology.

Here's Elise explaining how it worked.

You put these caps on the head, and there are very, very weak, near-infrared lights in the caps that essentially pick up on blood flow throughout the cortex of the brain.

So in real time, we can measure which different areas of a baby's brain and an adult's brain together are active in response to different tasks, in response to different facial expressions of the baby makes,

etc.

I thought it was really interesting in your study.

There was a note about certain participants being disqualified for excessive squirming.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

That's the wording straight out of the paper.

...