Towards imaging the infant brain at play

Infants' first-person experiences are crucial to early cognitive and neural development. To a vast extent, these early experiences involve play, which in infancy takes the form of object exploration. While at the behavioral level infant play has been studied both using specific tasks and in naturalistic scenarios, the neural correlates of object exploration have largely been studied in highly controlled task settings. These neuroimaging studies did not tap into the complexities of everyday play and what makes object exploration so important for development. Here, we review selected infant neuroimaging studies, spanning from typical, highly controlled screen-based studies on object perception to more naturalistic designs and argue for the importance of studying the neural correlates of key behaviors such as object exploration and language comprehension in naturalistic settings. We suggest that the advances in technology and analytic approaches allow measuring the infant brain at play with the use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Naturalistic fNIRS studies offer a new and exciting avenue to studying infant neurocognitive development in a way that will draw us away from our laboratory constructs and into an infant's everyday experiences that support their development.