This webinar will be presented by Dr Chiara Bulgarelli, Birkbeck, University of London
Empathy — the ability to share and understand others’ emotions — is foundational to social life, yet we know remarkably little about how it emerges in early childhood. Most of what we understand comes from adult neuroimaging or from behavioural studies in school-aged children, leaving the critical preschool window (ages 3–5) underexplored. In this talk, Dr Chiara Bulgarelli will present work from my ECR Leverhulme Trust Fellowship at the Birkbeck ToddlerLab, in which they will propose a framework where the understanding of others’ emotions may develop earlier than sharing them. Dr Bulgarelli will then show methodological advances in taking empathy research beyond the traditional lab using wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). She will discuss the technical challenges of pairing wearable fNIRS with immersive virtual reality in the CAVE, and ongoing work to make naturalistic neuroimaging genuinely inclusive of neurodivergent children.