Friday February 28 – Saturday March 1, 2025

About the event

The conference will explore current issues about the development of consciousness in infants, with particular attention to recent work on neural and behavioral markers of consciousness. The aim is to bring together neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who are working on infant consciousness to gain a better understanding of conscious awareness in infants. 

The conference will explore questions such as

• When does consciousness emerge in human infants?
• What do theories of consciousness predict about infant consciousness?   
• ⁠What evidence helps us detect consciousness in infants?
• What neurological and behavioral markers can be used to assess consciousness in infants?
• When do specific aspects of consciousness, such as self-awareness and a sense of agency, begin manifesting in infants?
• ⁠Is there a developmental border or a critical period for consciousness?
• ⁠What is the best methodology to investigate consciousness in infants?
• ⁠Are fetuses conscious, and if so, at what stage?
• ⁠What are the contents of a newborn baby’s consciousness? 
• ⁠What are the moral implications of the emergence of consciousness?
• What are the implications of developmental milestones in consciousness for early childhood education and care?
• How do issues about infant consciousness connect to issues about disorders of consciousness in non-human animals, and in AI systems?

Registration

Registration for in-person attendance is free but required. Please register via eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/infant-consciousness-conference-tickets-1217079149499?aff=oddtdtcreator

If you are from outside NYU, you must register by Wednesday February 26th so that your name/email address can be registered in our system. You will need to show government ID with photo to our security guard.

Livestream/Recording

We are likely to have a live stream (without hybrid participation) and to make recordings available after the conference. Details will be available shortly before the conference.

Program

Friday, February 28th (Hemmerdinger Hall, 31 Washington Place, Silver Center, 1st Floor)

9:00-9:30am • Coffee/Check-in

9:30-10:30am • Keynote 1: Lorina Naci – Typical and disrupted brain mechanism for conscious awareness in full-term and preterm infants

10:30-10:50am • Coffee Break

10:50am-12:50pm • Symposium 1: Neural Correlates of Infant Consciousness

– Topun Austin: Investigating the role of sleep and social touch on functional connectivity and socio-emotional development in the newborn infant

– Sid Kouider: Reflective mechanisms of perception and metacognition in infants

– Hamza Kebiri: Developmental thalamic functional connectivity and its potential implications for early neonatal consciousness

– Yusuke Nakashima: Immature recurrent processing in early infancy revealed by visual backward masking

12:50-2:00pm • Lunch Break

2:00-3:00pm • Keynote 2: Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Assessing consciousness in infants

3:00-4:00pm • Poster Session 1 / Coffee break

– Jessica Babcock: Prenatal intersubjectivity: A phenomenological analysis of fetal development

– Juan Ardia Cifuentes: Functional connectivity and fetal consciousness

– Renee Ye: Minimal self and early consciousness in Infants

– Qiyuan Zeng (and Darinka Trübutschek, Lucia Melloni): Event segmentation and subjective time perception: An inroad to infant consciousness

– Markus Tunte: Developing interoception: On the perception of bodily signals in infants and caregivers

4:00-6:00pm • Symposium 2: Pre-Natal Consciousness

– Anna Ciaunica: TBA

– Joel Frohlich: Do fetuses perceive individual rapid stimuli? Evidence from MEG frequency tagging

– William Graf: The neurobiological requisites of fetal sentience

– Niccolo Negro: An analogical abductive argument against foetal consciousness

6:00-7:00pm • Reception

Saturday, March 1st (Jurow Hall, 31 Washington Place, Silver Center, 1st Floor)

9:00-9:30am • Coffee

9:30-10:30am • Keynote 3: Tim Bayne, Babies, bees and bots: From theories to markers and back again

10:30-10:50am • Coffee Break

11:30am-12:40pm • Symposium 3: Infant Color Perception

– Ned Block: Non-conceptual color perception is more certain for children than adults

– Richard Brown Higher-Order Theories and Infant Color Consciousness

– Kathleen Akins: Color bit-by-bit: The gradualist approach to color vision development

– Yusuke Moriguchi: Comparing color qualia structures in young children versus adults

12:50-2:00pm • Lunch Break

2:00-4:00pm • Symposium 4: Development and Theories

– Cécile Gal: Do infants’ early error-monitoring and metacognition support their emerging self-awareness?

– Alison Gopnik: The phenomenology of exploration: New evidence for the infant lantern

– Thomas Varley: The emergence of a synergistic scaffold in the brains of infants

– Claudia Passos: Infant consciousness: Whether, when, where, what, how?

4:00-5:00pm • Poster Session 2 / Coffee break

1- Marianne Broeker (& Paul Azzopardi): Impact of unconscious processing onto perception and narrative system in infants: Presentation of a research tool

2. Nikolaus Kennelly: A Problem for Cross-Species Comparisons of Ontogenetic Flexibility

3. Jörg Noller (& Florian Heinen): Child Consciousness and Digitalization – A new Point of Cultural Intersection

4. Jack Spinella: A Paradox of Infant Agency?

5. Ayush Srivastava: Infant Dreaming: A Phenomenological Perspective on the First Minds

5:00-6:30 pm • Panel discussion: Susan Carey, David Chalmers, Matthew Liao, Moriah Thomason, Nicholas Turk-Browne

Conference Organizers

Ned Block, David Chalmers, S. Matthew Liao, Claudia Passos-Ferreira

This event will be co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness and the NYU Center for Bioethics.