Development of brain functional connectivity and its relation to infant sustained attention in the first year of life

Abstract

The study of brain functional connectivity is crucial to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the improved behavioral performance and amplified ERP responses observed during infant sustained attention. Previous investigations on the development of functional brain connectivity during infancy are primarily confined to the use of functional and structural MRI techniques. The current study examined the relation between infant sustained attention and brain functional connectivity and their development during infancy with high-density EEG recordings. Fifty-nine infants were tested at 6 (N = 15), 8 (N =14), 10 (N = 17), and 12 (N = 13) months. Infant sustained attention was defined by measuring infant heart rate changes during infants' looking. Functional connectivity was estimated from the electrodes on the scalp and with reconstructed cortical source activities in brain regions. It was found that infant sustained attention was accompanied by attenuated functional connectivity in the dorsal attention and default mode networks in the alpha band. Graph theory analyses showed that there was an increase in path length and a decrease in clustering coefficient during infant sustained attention. The functional connectivity within the visual, somatosensory, dorsal attention, and ventral attention networks and graph theory measures of path length and clustering coefficient were found to increase with age. These findings suggest that infant sustained attention is accompanied by distinct patterns of brain functional connectivity. The current findings also suggest the rapid development of functional connectivity in brain networks during infancy.

Effects of Maternal Psychopathology and Education Level on Neurocognitive Development in Infants of Adolescent Mothers Living in Poverty in Brazil

“…Increased maternal anxiety and lower maternal education were associated with weaker connectivity in oscillatory networks in the alpha frequency. Because connectivity in functional brain networks increases over the first year of life in typical development 31, 49, our findings of reduced connectivity in association with increased maternal anxiety and lower maternal education suggest that these maternal factors disrupt this process, perhaps hindering the formation of functional neural networks. Importantly, infants with the weakest connectivity in the network associated with maternal anxiety also showed the lowest cognitive ability.…”

“…Phase synchrony is believed to be a key neuronal communication mechanism that coordinates activity across different brain regions (functional connectivity), facilitating the formation of functional neural networks (30). While the specific brain regions involved in such networks cannot be localized with EEG owing to the technique’s low spatial resolution, the frequency at which phase synchronization occurs is, like oscillatory power, associated with particular neurocognitive functions 17, 31. Furthermore, disruptions to oscillatory networks, such as reduced phase synchrony in the alpha and gamma frequencies and atypically increased phase synchrony in the theta frequency, have been found to index exposure to adverse environments, maternal psychopathology, and early developmental problems in infancy 32, 33, 34.…”

“…Oscillatory power and phase synchronization are therefore valuable methods for investigating the influence of maternal variables on neural activity and the temporal dynamics of neural networks in early neurodevelopment. Following previous work 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, we focused on oscillatory power and phase synchronization (hereafter, “connectivity”) in the infant theta (4–6 Hz), alpha (6–9 Hz), and gamma (30–50 Hz) frequencies.…”

Explaining individual differences in infant visual sensory seeking

“…No behavioral criterion of cognitive habituation was employed (e.g., looking time). Rather, frontal theta oscillatory amplitude provided a direct measure of infants' progressive engagement and disengagement with the ongoing repeated video clip (Xie, Mallin, & Richards, 2019).…”

Child Growth Predicts Brain Functional Connectivity and Future Cognitive Outcomes in Urban Bangladeshi Children Exposed to Early Adversities

“…The pipeline for the source-space functional connectivity analysis used in the current study is illustrated in Supplemental Figure 1 (also see 22 ). Cortical source reconstruction was conducted for the scalp EEG data using realistic head models created for both 6-and 36-monthold cohorts using age-appropriate average MRI templates 23 .…”