Prefrontal Function Engaging in External-Focused Attention in 5- to 6-Month-Old Infants: A Suggestion for Default Mode Network

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Behrendt

et al. 2021

Highlights fNIRS and looking responses to emotional faces were measured in 5- and 7-month-olds. Emotional faces had varying identities within happy, angry, and fearful blocks. Temporo-parietal and frontal activations were observed, particularly to happy faces. Infants looked longer to the mouth region of angry faces. No difference in behavior or neural activity observed between 5- and 7-month-olds.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural responses to happy, fearful and angry faces of varying identities in 5- and 7-month-old infants

Bayet

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Behrendt

et al. 2021

“…Less looking to the eyes and more looking to the mouth was related to greater dSFG activations across all emotion conditions. The eye region is particularly relevant for decoding facial expressions (Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011), and prefrontal deactivation is associated with visual attention in children (Fekete, Beacher, Cha, Rubin, & Mujica-Parodi, 2014), adults (Lachaux et al, 2008), and infants (Xu et al, 2017). Thus, a decrease in dSFG activations with more eye looking may reflect increased attentional engagement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural responses to happy, fearful and angry faces of varying identities in 5- and 7-month-old infants

Bayet

Behrendt

et al. 2020

Preprint

Facial emotion processing is an important social skill that develops throughout infancy and early childhood. Here we investigate the neural underpinnings of the ability to process facial emotion across changes in facial identity in cross-sectional groups of 5-and 7-month-old infants. We simultaneously measured neural metabolic, behavioral, and autonomic responses to happy, fearful, and angry faces of different female models using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), eye-tracking, and heart rate measures. We observed significant neural activation to these facial emotions in a distributed set of frontal and temporal brain regions, and longer looking to the mouth region of angry faces compared to happy and fearful faces. No differences in looking behavior or neural activations were observed between 5-and 7-month-olds, although several exploratory, ageindependent associations between neural activations and looking behavior were noted. Overall, these findings suggest more developmental stability than previously thought in responses to emotional facial expressions of varying identities between 5-and 7-months of age.

“…Some shortcomings of the infant fNIRS studies to date are that these studies frequently have small sample sizes, disallowing for statistical correction of multiple comparisons, lack longitudinal follow-up, and often do not relate findings to concurrent or longitudinal behavioral indicators of social development. While there are notable exceptions (e.g., Imafuku et al, 2014; Lloyd-Fox et al, 2015; Lloyd-Fox et al, 2016; Ravicz et al, 2015; also see Xu et al, 2017), these factors currently limit the impact of the findings. At the same time, the sophistication of the methodology of fNIRS experiments has grown at an astonishing pace, and the knowledge gained from the studies describe above inform research efforts that seek to overcome these challenges and the initial limitations of infant fNIRS work.…”

Section: Foundational Fnirs Studies Of Infant Brain Responses To Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

The infant brain in the social world: Moving toward interactive social neuroscience with functional near-infrared spectroscopy

McDonald¹,

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

2018

Typically developing infants rapidly acquire a sophisticated array of social skills within the first year of life. These social skills are largely learned within the context of day-to-day interactions with caregivers. While social neuroscience has made great gains in our knowledge of the underlying neural circuitry of social cognition and behavior, much of this work has focused on experiments that sacrifice ecological validity for experimental control. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a promising methodology for measuring brain activity in the context of naturalistic social interactions. Here, we review what we have learned from fNIRS studies that have used traditional experimental stimuli to study social development during infancy. We then discuss recent infant fNIRS studies that have utilized more naturalistic social stimuli, followed by a discussion of applications of this methodology to the study of atypical social development, with a focus on infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder. We end with recommendations for applying fNIRS to studies of typically developing and at-risk infants in naturalistic social situations.