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

Abstract

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 ...

Delta- and theta-band cortical tracking and phase-amplitude coupling to sung speech by infants

“…Here, we applied TRFs in a backward direction to assess how strongly a stimulus property, in this case the stimulus envelope, is encoded in the neural response. The backwards, “stimulus reconstruction”, mTRF model has important advantages compared to previous forward linear encoding models in infants (39, 40). Specifically, it utilises data from all the EEG channels simultaneously in a multivariate manner, while forward TRF models are fit on individual channels separately.…”

“…mTRFs are encoding models that describe how the inputs and outputs of a system are linearly related. Forward models provide researchers with information regarding the precise spatial and temporal patterns reflecting the neural processing of a stimulus, as used previously with infants (30, 31). A backward ‘stimulus reconstruction’ version of the TRF linear modelling technique, not yet used with infants, was employed here.…”

Unilateral acoustic degradation delays attentional separation of competing speech

“…To analyse the temporal unfolding of neural encoding accuracy across sTRF time lags, we predicted the EEG response based on a 48-ms sliding window (24 ms overlap) of the sTRF (Fiedler et al, 2019; Jessen et al, 2019). In essence, we used each 48-ms time window of the sTRF separately to predict the EEG-Signal.…”

Neural Tracking in Infants – an Analytical Tool for Multisensory Social Processing in Development

“…When only relatively small amounts of clean neurophysiological data are available, assessing model performance across participants using a subject-independent generic model may be a helpful alternative (for a comparison of both approaches see e.g. Jessen et al (2019)).…”

“…adult-directed speech and found stronger neural tracking for infant-directed speech. Furthermore, encoding models have been used to analyze brain responses of 7-months-olds watching an audiovisual cartoon movie (Jessen et al, 2019). While both of these studies used encoding models, there is also evidence for the feasibility of applying decoding models.…”