Infant fMRI: A Model System for Cognitive Neuroscience

Ellis, Cameron T.; Turk‐Browne, Nicholas B.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.005

Cited by 52 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 108 publications

(126 reference statements)

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“…Our results indicate that neonates have higher connectivity to much of the cortex as compared to adults with the exception of areas of bilateral medial orbitofrontal, isthmus cingulate and precuneus. This is consistent with Riggins et al's (2016) conclusion that 4-year old children rely more on regions "outside" the canonical hippocampal network to complete episodic memory tasks, and other research suggesting the infant cortex is more broadly tuned than in adults (Ellis &Turk-Browne, 2018). The few regions where adults display higher FC than neonates reside mainly within DM network and highlight the immaturity of this network: adults show significantly greater DM-Hippocampal connectivity than neonates, consistent with finding that this network is one of the last to develop in the first year of life.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The intrinsic neonatal hippocampal network: rsfMRI findings

Howell

Osher

Saygin

2019

Preprint

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Many adults cannot voluntarily recall memories before the ages of 3-5, a phenomenon referred to as "infantile amnesia". The development of the hippocampal network likely plays a significant part in the emergence of the ability to form long-lasting memories. In adults, the hippocampus has specialized and privileged connections with certain cortical networks, which presumably facilitate its involvement in memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Is the hippocampus already specialized in these cortical connections at birth? And are the topographical principles of connectivity (e.g. long-axis specialization) present at birth? We analyzed resting-state hippocampal connectivity in neonates scanned within one week of birth (Developmental Human Connectome Project) and compared them to adults (Human Connectome Project). We explored the connections of the whole hippocampus and its long-axis specialization to seven canonical cortical networks. We found that the neonatal hippocampal networks show clear immaturity at birth: adults showed hippocampal connectivity that was unique for each cortical network, whereas neonates showed no differentiation in hippocampal connectivity across these networks. Further, neonates lacked long-axis specialization (i.e., along anterior-posterior axis) of the hippocampus in its differential connectivity patterns to the cortical networks. This immaturity in connectivity may contribute to immaturity in memory formation in the first years of life. Significance Statement:While animal data, and anatomical and behavioral human data from young children suggest that the hippocampus is immature at birth, to date, there are no direct assessments of human hippocampal functional connectivity (FC) very early in life. Our study explores the FC of the hippocampus to the cortex at birth, allowing insight into the development of human memory systems.Recently, Wael and colleagues (2018) showed the hippocampus has a clear intrinsic pattern of functional connectivity (FC) to a set of cortical networks in adults. Further, this connectivity pattern differed between the anterior and posterior portions of the hippocampus. This so-called long-axis specialization of the hippocampus is consistent with previous research showing that the anterior and posterior hippocampus display different patterns of structural and functional connectivity and may be uniquely activated in response to cognitive, memory and spatial demands (for reviews see Poppenk et al., 2013, Strange et al., 2014. The development of the hippocampal

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The intrinsic neonatal hippocampal network: rsfMRI findings

Howell

Osher

Saygin

2019

Preprint

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“…How behaviours relate to a conscious experience of pain is ultimately unknown. Neuroimaging provides more direct insight into the neural processes underlying infant experience 32,33 and has the potential to improve the inferences we make about pain in nonverbal populations. Multivariate fMRI signatures aim to robustly link features of brain activity to specific experiences 15,19 , and a key potential application of these signatures is to make valuable inferences in challenging patient populations with limited communication.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring the infant pain experience: a translational fMRI-based signature study

Duff

Moultrie

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Neuroimaging studies in healthy human infants are subject to severe constraints, as participants cannot follow verbal instructions, show generally short attention spans, and overall tend to be not very cooperative. As functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are difficult to realize in infants (Ellis & Turk-Browne, 2018), electroencephalography (EEG) continues to be the most popular method to investigate cognitive brain mechanisms in very young children and infants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the individual auditory and visual brain response in 7- month-old infants watching a brief cartoon movie

Jessen

Fiedler

Münte

et al. 2019

Preprint

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ecologically valid stimuli; developmental neuroscience 24 25 2 ABSTRACT 26Electroencephalography (EEG) continues to be the most popular method to investigate 27 cognitive brain mechanisms in young children and infants. Most infant studies rely on 28 the well-established and easy-to-use event-related brain potential (ERP). As a severe 29 disadvantage, ERP computation requires a large number of repetitions of items from 30 the same stimulus-category, compromising both ERPs' reliability and their ecological 31 validity in infant research. We here explore a way to investigate infant continuous EEG 32 responses to an ongoing, engaging signal (i.e., "neural tracking") by using multivariate 33 temporal response functions (mTRFs), an approach increasingly popular in adult-EEG 34 research. N=52 infants watched a 5-min episode of an age-appropriate cartoon while 35 the EEG signal was recorded. We estimated and validated forward encoding models 36 of auditory-envelope and visual-motion features. We compared individual and group-37 based ('generic') models of the infant brain response to comparison data from N=28 38 adults. The generic model yielded clearly defined response functions for both, the 39 auditory and the motion regressor. Importantly, this response profile was present also 40 on an individual level, albeit with lower precision of the estimate but above-chance 41 predictive accuracy for the modelled individual brain responses. In sum, we 42 demonstrate that mTRFs are a feasible way of analyzing continuous EEG responses in 43 infants. We observe robust response estimates both across and within participants 44 from only five minutes of recorded EEG signal. Our results open ways for 45 incorporating more engaging and more ecologically valid stimulus materials when 46 probing cognitive, perceptual, and affective processes in infants and young children.47 48 79 mainstream in non-human and adult human neuroscientific research, it is still rare in 80 infant research. This is unfortunate, since they not only have yielded important new 81 insights in adult research and are likely to offer the same potential in infant studies, 82 4 but they may even provide higher gains in infancy research, which suffers from 83 notoriously low data quality and quantity. It may for instance reduce attrition rates, as 84 experimental designs can be optimized to be highly engaging for infant participants. 85 Rather than presenting hundreds of repetitions of very similar stimuli, which raises 86 the additional challenge of keeping a non-cooperative participant attending to the 87 screen, participants can be presented with constantly changing, engaging videos in 88 which stimuli are embedded. 89 Importantly, as in adult work, infant brain research has seen an increased interest in 90 the use of naturalistic settings over the past years. Recent research has for instance 91 demonstrated the feasibility of investigating interpersonal neural coupling in adult-92 infant-interactions (Leong et al., 2017) or the use of oscillatory brain responses in ...

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Infant fMRI: A Model System for Cognitive Neuroscience

Cited by 52 publications

References 108 publications

The intrinsic neonatal hippocampal network: rsfMRI findings

The intrinsic neonatal hippocampal network: rsfMRI findings

Inferring the infant pain experience: a translational fMRI-based signature study

Quantifying the individual auditory and visual brain response in 7- month-old infants watching a brief cartoon movie

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