Biology subjects

Georgieva, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Georgieva, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Parental neural responsivity to infants visual attention: how mature brains scaffold immature brains during social interaction.

Almost all attention and learning - in particular, most early learning - takes place in social settings. But little is known of how our brains support dynamic social interactions. We recorded dual-EEG from infants and parents during solo play and joint play. During solo play, fluctuations in infants Theta power significantly forward-predicted their subsequent attentional behaviours. But this forwards-predictiveness was lower during joint play than solo play, suggesting that infants endogenous neural control over attention is greater during solo play. Overall, however, infants were more attentive to the objects during joint play. To understand why, we examined how adult brain activity related to infant attention. We found that parents Theta power closely tracked and responded to changes in their infants attention. Further, instances in which parents showed greater neural responsivity were associated with longer sustained attention by infants. Our results offer new insights into how one partner influences another during social interaction.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Topographical and spectral signatures of infant and adult movement artifacts in naturalistic EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) is perhaps the most widely used brain-imaging technique for paediatric populations. However, EEG signals are prone to distortion by motion. Compared to adults, infants motion is both more frequent and less stereotypical yet motion effects on the infant EEG signal are largely undocumented. Here, we present a systematic assessment of naturalistic motion effects on the infant and adult EEG signal. In Study 1, we documented the prevalence of 27 naturally occurring facial and body motions by video-coding five mother-infant pairs during naturalistic play. In Study 2, we elicited a subset of the most common facial, limb and postural motions from one adult and one infant actor while their EEG was recorded. In Study 3, we recorded EEG signals from a larger group of 12 infants whilst they produced the same motions spontaneously. Our findings from Study 2 suggested that adult movements mainly generated increases in spectral power relative to resting state, primarily at peripheral sites and in delta and high-beta frequency bands. In infants, both elicited motions (N=1, Study 2) and spontaneously-occurring motions (N=12, Study 3) produced decreases in theta, alpha and beta power over central regions and increased beta/delta power at peripheral sites. We also observed that infants jaw and upper limb movements generated more pronounced EEG artifacts than lower limb movements. It is intended that this work will inform future development of methods for addressing EEG motion-related artifacts and support wider use of naturalistic paradigms in social and developmental neuroscience.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Towards a neuroscientific understanding of play: A neuropsychological coding framework for analysing infant-adult play patterns

During early life, play is a ubiquitous activity, and an individuals propensity for play is positively related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. Play behaviour is diverse and multi-faceted. A challenge for current research is to converge on a common definition and measurement system for play - whether examined at a behavioural, cognitive or neurological level. Combining these different approaches in a multi-level analysis could yield significant advances in understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of play, and provide the basis for developing biologically-grounded play models. However, there is currently no integrated framework for conducting a multi-level analysis of play that spans brain, cognition and behaviour. The proposed neuropsychological coding framework uses grounded and observable behaviours along three neuropsychological dimensions (sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional), to compute inferences about playful behaviour and related social interactional states. Here, we illustrate the sensitivity and utility of the proposed coding framework using two contrasting dyadic corpora (N=5) of mother-infant object-oriented interactions during experimental conditions that were either conducive (Condition 1) or non-conducive (Condition 2) to the emergence of playful behaviour. We find that the framework accurately identifies the modal form of social interaction as being either playful (Condition 1) or non-playful (Condition 2), and further provides useful insights about differences in the quality of social interaction and temporal synchronicity within the dyad. In conclusion, here, we present a novel neuropsychological framework for analysing the continuous time-evolution of adult-infant play patterns, underpinned by biologically informed state coding along sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions. We expect that the proposed framework will have wide utility amongst researchers wishing to employ an integrated, multi-level approach to the study of play, and lead towards a greater understanding of the neuroscientific basis of play and may yield insights into a new biologically-grounded taxonomy of play interactions.

neuroscience↗