Biology subjects

Marriott Haresign, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Marriott Haresign, I..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2022

The development of the relationship between auditory and visual neural sensitivity and autonomic arousal from 6m to 12m

The differential sensitivity hypothesis argues that environmental sensitivity has the bivalent effect of predisposing individuals to both the risk-inducing and development-enhancing influences of early social environments. However, the hypothesis requires that this variation in environmental sensitivity be general across domains. In this study, we focused on neural sensitivity and autonomic arousal to test domain generality. Neural sensitivity can be assessed by correlating measures of perceptual sensitivity, as indexed by event-related potentials (ERP) in electrophysiology. The sensitivity of autonomic arousal can be tested via heart rate changes. Domain generality was tested by comparing associations in perceptual sensitivity across auditory and visual domains, and associations between sensitivity in sensory domains and heart rate We contrasted ERP components in auditory (P3) and visual (P1, N290 and P4) detection-of-difference tasks for N=68 infants longitudinally at 6 and 12 months of age. Domain generality should produce correlated individual differences in sensitivity across the two modalities, with higher levels of autonomic arousal associating with increased perceptual sensitivity. Having controlled for multiple comparisons, at 6 months of age, the difference in amplitude of the P3 component evoked in response to standard and deviant tones correlated with the difference in amplitude of the P1 N290 and P4 face-sensitive components evoked in response to fearful and neutral faces. However, this correlation was not found at 12 months of age. Similarly, autonomic arousal negatively correlated with neural sensitivity at 6 months but not at 12 months. The results suggest neural perceptual sensitivity is domain-general across auditory and visual domains, and is related to autonomic arousal at 6 months but not at 12 months of age. We interpret these findings within a neuroconstructivist framework and with respect to the concept of interactive specialisation. By 12 months of age, more experience of visual processing may have led to top-down endogenous attention mechanisms that process visual information in a way that no longer associates with auditory perceptual sensitivity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Gaze onsets during naturalistic infant-caregiver interaction associate with 'sender' but not 'receiver' neural responses, and do not lead to changes in inter-brain synchrony.

Temporal coordination during infant-caregiver social interaction is thought to be crucial for supporting early language acquisition and cognitive development. Despite a growing prevalence of theories suggesting that increased inter-brain synchrony associates with many key aspects of social interactions such as mutual gaze, little is known about how this arises during development. Here, we investigated the role of mutual gaze onsets as a potential driver of inter-brain synchrony. We extracted dual EEG activity around naturally occurring gaze onsets during infant-caregiver social interactions in N=55 dyads (mean age 12 months). We differentiated between two types of gaze onset, depending on each partners role. Sender gaze onsets were defined at a time when either the adult or the infant made a gaze shift towards their partner at a time when their partner was either already looking at them (mutual) or not looking at them (non-mutual). Receiver gaze onsets were defined at a time when their partner made a gaze shift towards them at a time when either the adult or the infant was already looking at their partner (mutual) or not (non-mutual). Contrary to our hypothesis we found that, during a naturalistic interaction, both mutual and non-mutual gaze onsets were associated with changes in the sender, but not the receivers brain activity and were not associated with increases in inter-brain synchrony above baseline. Further, we found that mutual, compared to non-mutual gaze onsets were not associated with increased inter brain synchrony. Overall, our results suggest that the effects of mutual gaze are strongest at the intra-brain level, in the sender but not the receiver of the mutual gaze.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Using dual EEG to analyse event-locked changes in child-adult neural connectivity

Current approaches typically measure the connectivity between interacting physiological systems as a time-invariant property. This approach obscures crucial information about how connectivity between interacting systems is established and maintained. Here, we describe methods, and present computational algorithms, that will allow researchers to address this deficit. We focus on how two different approaches to measuring connectivity, namely concurrent (e.g., power correlations, phase locking) and sequential (e.g., Granger causality), can be applied to three aspects of the brain signal, namely amplitude, power, and phase. We guide the reader through worked examples using mainly simulated data on how to leverage these methods to measure changes in interbrain connectivity between adults and children/infants relative to events identified within continuous EEG data during a free-flowing naturalistic interaction. For each, we aim to provide a detailed explanation of the interpretation of the analysis and how they can be usefully used when studying early social interactions.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Automatic classification of ICA components from infant EEG using MARA

Automated systems for identifying and removing non-neural ICA components are growing in popularity among adult EEG researchers. Infant EEG data differs in many ways from adult EEG data, but there exists almost no specific system for automated classification of source components from paediatric populations. Here, we adapt one of the most popular systems for adult ICA component classification for use with infant EEG data. Our adapted classifier significantly outperformed the original adult classifier on samples of naturalistic free play EEG data recorded from 10 to 12-month-old infants, achieving agreement rates with the manual classification of over 75% across two validation studies (n=44, n=25). Additionally, we examined both classifiers ability to remove stereotyped ocular artifact from a basic visual processing ERP dataset, compared to manual ICA data cleaning. Here the new classifier performed on level with expert manual cleaning and was again significantly better than the adult classifier at removing artifact whilst retaining a greater amount of genuine neural signal, operationalised through comparing ERP activations in time and space. Our new system (iMARA) offers developmental EEG researchers a flexible tool for automatic identification and removal of artifactual ICA components.

neuroscience↗