Face processing in the brains of pre-school aged children measured with MEG

Abstract

There are two competing theories concerning the development of face perception: a late maturation account and an early maturation account. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) neuroimaging holds promise for adjudicating between the two opposing accounts by providing objective neurophysiological measures of face processing, with sufficient temporal resolution to isolate face-specific brain responses from those associated with other sensory, cognitive and motor processes. The current study used a customized child MEG system to measure M100 and M170 brain responses in 15 children aged three to six years while they viewed faces, cars and their phase-scrambled counterparts. Compared to adults tested using the same stimuli in a conventional MEG system, children showed significantly larger and later M100 responses. Children's M170 responses, derived by subtracting the responses to phase-scrambled images from the corresponding images (faces or cars) were delayed in latency but otherwise resembled the adult M170. This component has not been obtained in previous studies of young children tested using conventional adult MEG systems. However children did show a markedly reduced M170 response to cars in comparison to adults. This may reflect children's lack of expertise with cars relative to faces. Taken together, these data are in accord with recent behavioural and neuroimaging data that support early maturation of the basic face processing functions.

Development of effective connectivity in the core network for face perception

“…Previously, using the same dataset, we have demonstrated that a face‐sensitive M170 brain response can be elicited in preschool children [He et al, ]. This finding was in broad agreement with a recent event‐related potential study [Kuefner et al, ], but contradicted previous MEG studies, which failed to find an adult‐like M170 in children [Kylliäinen et al, ; Taylor et al, ].…”

Word and object recognition during reading acquisition: MEG evidence

“…The distribution and the timing of this effect are consistent with those reported in previous electrophysiological studies for recognition and semantic encoding of visual objects (Friedman et al, 1988, Friedman et al, 1992, He et al, 2015). Importantly, we observed changes of these responses as a function of reading scores and picture naming scores, with increased left responses to objects relative to scrambles as reading and verbal decoding of visual images improves.…”

“…It should be noted that these studies never considered literacy as an experimental factor. Also, it has been claimed that object specific activation is particularly difficult to be mapped in young children (Aylward et al, 2005, Gathers et al, 2004, He et al, 2015). These mapping difficulties might be due to the high variability of brain response localizations across young participants (Gathers et al, 2004).…”

Developmental Changes in Movement Related Brain Activity in Early Childhood

“…Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings provide a well-established technique for studying the time course of brain activity during motor tasks, as well as the role of oscillatory networks in motor control (for review see, Cheyne 2013). With the introduction of customized MEG systems for smaller children, MEG can fill the current gap between our knowledge of early neural development and that of motor and cognitive abilities (Johnson et al 2010, Cheyne et al 2014, Roberts et al 2014, He et al 2015, Okada et al 2016, He and Johnson 2018). There are however, relatively few MEG studies of motor development, partly due to the challenges of recording motor responses in children and most studies to date have focused on older children and adolescents (Gaetz et al 2010, Wilson et al 2010, Huo et al 2011, Trevarrow et al 2018).…”