The Infant Brain’s Response to Social Cues: An Early Life Marker of Mental Health Risk
Poster No:
1026
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Sohye Kim1, Hannah Spear1, Satra Ghosh2, Rahul Brito2, Steven Hodge1, Tiffany Moore Simas1, Nancy Byatt1, Stephen Nicholas1, David Kennedy1, Jean Frazier1
Institutions:
1University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA, 2Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
The fundamental architecture of the social brain is developed in infancy, and early deficits in social development are difficult to compensate for later in life (Ma, 2015). However, current techniques limit our ability to assess early differences and deficits in the infant's social brain. This has limited our fundamental knowledge of the developing social brain in human infants and has delayed the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics targeting these crucial earliest years. The goal of the present study was to use a novel auditory fMRI paradigm to measure the infant brain's developing responsiveness to social cues at 6 months of age and to examine its associations with the mother's and the infant's mental health risk.
Methods:
Our novel fMRI paradigm scans infants during natural sleep and relies on the infant's fully developed auditory responsiveness present by 6 months and well preserved under sleep (Blasi, 2011; Wild, 2017). Fifty-two typically developing 6-month-old (1± month) infants were scanned during natural sleep, listening to maternal voice, unfamiliar female voice, and speech-shaped noise (15-sec-long blocks; 7.5-sec inter-block intervals). Unfamiliar voices were distinct from maternal voice on 512 features extracted by the Pyannote machine learning model (Bredin, 2020; Coria, 2020). Speech-shaped noise was generated to match maternal voice frequency spectrum and amplitude-shaped to match the target passage. FMRI data was processed using FEAT (FMRI Expert Analysis Tool) version 6.00, part of FSL. A total of 134 runs from 40 infants (20 males) passed quality assurance, showing distinct auditory activation and no excessive movement, and were included in the analysis. Voxel-wise whole-brain analyses examined the infant's fMRI response to: (a) human (maternal and unfamiliar) voice compared to speech-shaped noise, and (b) maternal voice compared to unfamiliar voice, adjusting for infant sex and age (in weeks). Z-statistic images were thresholded using clusters determined by Z > 3.1 and a corrected cluster threshold of p = .05. Correlational analysis examined Pearson's r between the infant's fMRI responses to the maternal > unfamiliar voice contrast and measures of maternal depression (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; Cox, 1987), maternal anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory; Spielberger, 1989), maternal stress (Perceived Stress Scale; Cohen, 1983), and infant negative emotionality (Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, Very Short Form; Putnam, 2014).
Results:
Compared to speech-shaped noise, human voice elicited increased activations in multiple cortical regions of the infant's social brain (Figure 1A), including the superior temporal gyrus, temporoparietal junction, and medial prefrontal cortex. Compared to unfamiliar voice, maternal voice elicited increased activations in all aforementioned cortical regions, and additionally in key dopamine- and oxytocin-rich subcortical regions (Figure 1B), including the striatum, amygdala, and ventral diencephalon (encompassing the hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area, and substantia nigra). Compared to maternal voice, unfamiliar voice did not elicit any additional activations. Maternal depression, anxiety, stress, and infant negative emotionality negatively correlated with the infant's preferential brain responses to maternal voice in key social brain regions (Figure 2).
Conclusions:
Six-month-old infants show preferential brain responses to human voice and voice of their first social partner. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the infant's preferential response to social cues is negatively associated with maternal depression, anxiety, and stress, and infant negative emotionality. When extended to at-risk infants, this work has the potential to yield breakthroughs in identifying novel neural markers that can detect early differences and deficits in an infant's developing social brain.
Disorders of the Nervous System:
Neurodevelopmental/ Early Life (eg. ADHD, autism) 2
Psychiatric (eg. Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia)
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Cognition
Lifespan Development:
Normal Brain Development: Fetus to Adolescence 1
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Perception: Auditory/ Vestibular
Keywords:
Development
FUNCTIONAL MRI
NORMAL HUMAN
PEDIATRIC
Psychiatric
Other - infant; brain development; social responsiveness; maternal mental health
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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2. Bredin, H. (2020). Pyannote.audio: Neural building blocks for speaker diarization. ICASSP 2020 – IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Barcelona, Spain, 7124-7128.
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4. Coria, J.M. (2020). A comparison of metric learning loss functions for end-to-end speaker verification. In: Espinosa-Anke, L., Martin-Vide, C., & Spasic, I., eds. Statistical Language and Speech Processing, 2020. Cardiff, UK, Springer. 137-148.
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6. Ma, S. (2015). Early childhood health promotion and its life course health consequences. In: Reynolds, A.J., Rolnick, A.J., & Temple, J.A., eds. Health and Education in Early Childhood: Predictors, Interventions, and Policies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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9. Wild, C.J. (2017). Adult-like processing of naturalistic sounds in auditory cortex by 3- and 9-month old infants. Neuroimage, 157(15), 623-634.