Early adversity in rural India impacts the brain networks underlying visual working memory

Abstract

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain plasticity is also a source of hope: reliable, accessible, culturally agnostic methods to assess early brain development in low resource settings might be used to measure the impact of early adversity, identify infants for timely intervention and guide the development and monitor the effectiveness of early interventions. Visual working memory (VWM) is an early marker of cognitive capacity that has been assessed reliably in early infancy and is predictive of later academic achievement in Western countries. Here, we localized the functional brain networks that underlie VWM in early development in rural India using a portable neuroimaging system, and we assessed the impact of adversity on these brain networks. We recorded functional brain activity as young children aged 4–48 months performed a VWM task. Brain imaging results revealed localized activation in the frontal cortex, replicating findings from a Midwestern US sample. Critically, children from families with low maternal education and income showed weaker brain activity and poorer distractor suppression in canonical working memory areas in the left frontal cortex. Implications of this work are far‐reaching: it is now cost‐effective to localize functional brain networks in early development in low‐resource settings, paving the way for novel intervention and assessment methods.

Home assessment of visual working memory in pre-schoolers reveals associations between behaviour, brain activation and environmental measures.

“…Another study used a portable fNIRS system to investigate the neural networks underlying VWM processing in infants and children in rural India. They found that VWM performance was inversely correlated with activation in the bilateral frontal cortices, such that increased activation in this area was associated with poorer VWM performance (Wijeakumar et al, 2019). This study highlights another crucial advantage of fNIRS over other neuroimaging modalities -its portability, allowing researchers to freely explore cognitive processes outside of a traditional lab setting.…”

“…However, this limitation is less pronounced in children due to their smaller brains and thinner skulls (Buss et al, 2014). fNIRS has also been reliably used across the lifespan to study changes in activation in the frontal and parietal networks underlying VWM (Buss et al, 2014;Sato et al, 2013;Wijeakumar et al, 2019Wijeakumar et al, , 2017aWijeakumar et al, , 2017b. HOME ASSESSMENT OF VISUAL WORKING MEMORY Using fNIRS, Tsujimoto and colleagues (2004) examined VWM performance on a CD task in a sample of adults and five-year-old children.…”

fNIRS for Tracking Brain Development in the Context of Global Health Projects

“…Furthermore, correlations between these responses and psychosocial risks, such as maternal education, maternal stress and the caregiving environment, are also reported. Wijeakumar et al report findings from a Globalfnirs study investigating early adversity in rural India, focusing on the impact on the functional brain networks underlying visual working memory [41]. Forty-two 4-to 48-month-olds were recruited from the most populous region in India, Uttar Pradesh, where children are exposed to poverty-related developmental challenges from early infancy, and thus represent a population relatively similar to that of the above-mentioned study.…”

Introduction to special issue on global child development studies

“…Numerous studies included in this issue present adaptation and/ or testing of behavioral and neuroimaging measures to ensure that these are locally appropriate, feasible, and acceptable for measurement of children's behavioral (Milosavljevic et al, ; Obradović et al, ; Willoughby, Piper, Oyanga, & Merseth, ), language (Dulay, Cheung, & McBride, ; Jasińska, Wolf, Jukes, & Dubeck, ; Knauer, Kariger, Jakiela, Ozier, & Fernald, ; Lervåg, Dolean, Tincas, & Melby‐Lervåg, ), and neural development (Lloyd‐Fox et al, ; Perdue et al, ; Pyykkö et al, ; Turesky et al, ; Wijeakumar, Kumar, M. Delgado Reyes, Tiwari, & Spencer, ). Milosavljevic et al (), for example, test the adaptation of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning in the Gambia and cast light on developmental patterns in children aged 5–24 months.…”

“…mentPerdue et al, 2019;Pyykkö et al, 2018;Turesky et al, 2019;Wijeakumar, Kumar, M. Delgado Reyes, Tiwari, & Spencer, 2019) Milosavljevic et al (2019),. for example, test the adaptation of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning in the Gambia and cast light on developmental patterns in children aged 5-24 months.They identify a pattern of older children receiving lower scores and suggest that this may reveal a developmental period during which infants at risk for cognitive delay begin to exhibit early behavioral manifestations of exposure to adversity (e.g., poverty and malnu-trition).…”