Brains in Sync: Practical Guideline for Parent-Infant EEG During Natural Interaction

Exploring early life social and executive function development in infants and risk for autism: a prospective cohort study protocol of NICU graduates and infants at risk for cerebral palsy

BACKGROUND

Delays in early social and executive function are predictive of later developmental delays and eventual neurodevelopmental diagnoses. There is limited research examining such markers in the first year of life. High-risk infant groups commonly present with a range of neurodevelopmental challenges, including social and executive function delays, and show higher rates of autism diagnoses later in life. For example, it has been estimated that up to 30% of infants diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP) will go on to be diagnosed with autism later in life.

METHODS

This article presents a protocol of a prospective longitudinal study. The primary aim of this study is to identify early life markers of delay in social and executive function in high-risk infants at the earliest point in time, and to explore how these markers may relate to the increased risk for social and executive delay, and risk of autism, later in life. High-risk infants will include Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) graduates, who are most commonly admitted for premature birth and/or cardiovascular problems. In addition, we will include infants with, or at risk for, CP. This prospective study will recruit 100 high-risk infants at the age of 3-12 months old and will track social and executive function across the first 2 years of their life, when infants are 3-7, 8-12, 18 and 24 months old. A multi-modal approach will be adopted by tracking the early development of social and executive function using behavioural, neurobiological, and caregiver-reported everyday functioning markers. Data will be analysed to assess the relationship between the early markers, measured from as early as 3-7 months of age, and the social and executive function as well as the autism outcomes measured at 24 months.

DISCUSSION

This study has the potential to promote the earliest detection and intervention opportunities for social and executive function difficulties as well as risk for autism in NICU graduates and/or infants with, or at risk for, CP. The findings of this study will also expand our understanding of the early emergence of autism across a wider range of at-risk groups.

Current perspectives on perinatal mental health and neurobehavioral development: focus on regulation, coregulation and self-regulation

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Perinatal mental health research provides an important perspective on neurobehavioral development. Here, we aim to review the association of maternal perinatal health with offspring neurodevelopment, providing an update on (self-)regulation problems, hypothesized mechanistic pathways, progress and challenges, and implications for mental health.

RECENT FINDINGS

(1) Meta-analyses confirm that maternal perinatal mental distress is associated with (self-)regulation problems which constitute cognitive, behavioral, and affective social-emotional problems, while exposure to positive parental mental health has a positive impact. However, effect sizes are small. (2) Hypothesized mechanistic pathways underlying this association are complex. Interactive and compensatory mechanisms across developmental time are neglected topics. (3) Progress has been made in multiexposure studies. However, challenges remain and these are shared by clinical, translational and public health sciences. (4) From a mental healthcare perspective, a multidisciplinary and system level approach employing developmentally-sensitive measures and timely treatment of (self-)regulation and coregulation problems in a dyadic caregiver-child and family level approach seems needed. The existing evidence-base is sparse.

SUMMARY

During the perinatal period, addressing vulnerable contexts and building resilient systems may promote neurobehavioral development. A pluralistic approach to research, taking a multidisciplinary approach to theoretical models and empirical investigation needs to be fostered.

Why behaviour matters: Studying inter-brain coordination during child-caregiver interaction

Modern technology allows for simultaneous neuroimaging from interacting caregiver-child dyads. Whereas most analyses that examine the coordination between brain regions within an individual brain do so by measuring changes relative to observed events, studies that examine coordination between two interacting brains generally do this by measuring average intra-brain coordination across entire blocks or experimental conditions. In other words, they do not examine changes in inter-brain coordination relative to individual behavioural events. Here, we discuss the limitations of this approach. First, we present data suggesting that fine-grained temporal interdependencies in behaviour can leave residual artifact in neuroimaging data. We show how artifact can manifest as both power and (through that) phase synchrony effects in EEG and affect wavelet transform coherence in fNIRS analyses. Second, we discuss different possible mechanistic explanations of how inter-brain coordination is established and maintained. We argue that non-event-locked approaches struggle to differentiate between them. Instead, we contend that approaches which examine how interpersonal dynamics change around behavioural events have better potential for addressing possible artifactual confounds and for teasing apart the overlapping mechanisms that drive changes in inter-brain coordination.

The association of maternal-infant interactive behavior, dyadic frontal alpha asymmetry, and maternal anxiety in a smartphone-adapted still face paradigm

Mother-infant interactions form a strong basis for emotion regulation development in infants. These interactions can be affected by various factors, including maternal postnatal anxiety. Electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning allows for simultaneous assessment of mother-infant brain-to-behavior association during stressful events, such as the still-face paradigm (SFP). This study aimed at investigating dyadic interactive behavior and brain-to-behavior association across SFP and identifying neural correlates of mother-infant interactions in the context of maternal postnatal anxiety. We measured frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA), a physiological correlate of emotion regulation and a potential marker of risk for psychopathology. To emulate real-life interactions, EEG and behavioral data were collected from 38 mother-infant dyads during a smartphone-adapted dual-SFP. Although the behavioral data showed a clear still-face effect for the smartphone-adapted SFP, this was not reflected in the infant or maternal FAA. Brain-to-behavior data showed higher infant negative affect being associated with more infant leftward FAA during the still-face episodes. Finally, mothers with higher postnatal anxiety showed more right FAA during the first still-face episode, suggesting negative affectivity and a need to withdraw from the situation. Our results form a baseline for further research assessing the effects of maternal postnatal anxiety on infants' FAA and dyadic interactive behavior.

When "more for others, less for self" leads to co-benefits: A tri-MRI dyad-hyperscanning study

Unselfishness is admired, especially when collaborations between groups of various scales are urgently needed. However, its neural mechanisms remain elusive. In a tri-MRI dyad-hyperscanning experiment involving 26 groups, each containing 4 participants as two rotating pairs in a coordination game, we sought to achieve reciprocity, or "winning in turn by the two interacting players," as the precursor to unselfishness. Due to its critical role in social processing, the right temporal-parietal junction (rTPJ) was the seed for both time domain (connectivity) and frequency domain (i.e., coherence) analyses. For the former, negative connectivity between the rTPJ and the mentalizing network areas (e.g., the right inferior parietal lobule, rIPL) was identified, and such connectivity was further negatively correlated with the individual's final gain, supporting our task design that "rewarded" the reciprocal participants. For the latter, cerebral coherences of the rTPJs emerged between the interacting pairs (i.e., within-group interacting pairs), and the coupling between the rTPJ and the right superior temporal gyrus (rSTG) between the players who were not interacting with each other (i.e., within-group noninteracting pairs). These coherences reinforce the hypotheses that the rTPJ-rTPJ coupling tracks the collaboration processes and the rTPJ-rSTG coupling for the emergence of decontextualized shared meaning. Our results underpin two social roles (inferring others' behavior and interpreting social outcomes) subserved by the rTPJ-related network and highlight its interaction with other-self/other-concerning brain areas in reaching co-benefits among unselfish players.

Early social communication through music: State of the art and future perspectives

A growing body of research shows that the universal capacity for music perception and production emerges early in development. Possibly building on this predisposition, caregivers around the world often communicate with infants using songs or speech entailing song-like characteristics. This suggests that music might be one of the earliest developing and most accessible forms of interpersonal communication, providing a platform for studying early communicative behavior. However, little research has examined music in truly communicative contexts. The current work aims to facilitate the development of experimental approaches that rely on dynamic and naturalistic social interactions. We first review two longstanding lines of research that examine musical interactions by focusing either on the caregiver or the infant. These include defining the acoustic and non-acoustic features that characterize infant-directed (ID) music, as well as behavioral and neurophysiological research examining infants' processing of musical timing and pitch. Next, we review recent studies looking at early musical interactions holistically. This research focuses on how caregivers and infants interact using music to achieve co-regulation, mutual engagement, and increase affiliation and prosocial behavior. We conclude by discussing methodological, technological, and analytical advances that might empower a comprehensive study of musical communication in early childhood.

Dual-MEG interbrain synchronization during turn-taking verbal interactions between mothers and children

Verbal interaction and imitation are essential for language learning and development in young children. However, it is unclear how mother-child dyads synchronize oscillatory neural activity at the cortical level in turn-based speech interactions. Our study investigated interbrain synchrony in mother-child pairs during a turn-taking paradigm of verbal imitation. A dual-MEG (magnetoencephalography) setup was used to measure brain activity from interactive mother-child pairs simultaneously. Interpersonal neural synchronization was compared between socially interactive and noninteractive tasks (passive listening to pure tones). Interbrain networks showed increased synchronization during the socially interactive compared to noninteractive conditions in the theta and alpha bands. Enhanced interpersonal brain synchrony was observed in the right angular gyrus, right triangular, and left opercular parts of the inferior frontal gyrus. Moreover, these parietal and frontal regions appear to be the cortical hubs exhibiting a high number of interbrain connections. These cortical areas could serve as a neural marker for the interactive component in verbal social communication. The present study is the first to investigate mother-child interbrain neural synchronization during verbal social interactions using a dual-MEG setup. Our results advance our understanding of turn-taking during verbal interaction between mother-child dyads and suggest a role for social "gating" in language learning.