Poster No:
1029
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Marie Santillo1, Cliona O'Doherty1, Áine Dineen1, Anna Truzzi1, Graham King1, Chiara Caldinelli1, Enna-Louise D’Arcy1, Anna Kravchenko1, Tamrin Halloway1, Eleanor Molloy2, Adrienne Foran3, Ailbhe Tarrant3, Angela Byrne4, Rhodri Cusack1
Institutions:
1Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Dublin, Ireland, 2Pediatrics and Child Health,Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 3The Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, Ireland, 4The Coombe Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
First Author:
Marie Santillo
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Dublin, Ireland
Co-Author(s):
Áine Dineen
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Dublin, Ireland
Anna Truzzi
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Dublin, Ireland
Graham King
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Dublin, Ireland
Eleanor Molloy
Pediatrics and Child Health,Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Rhodri Cusack
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Dublin, Ireland
Introduction:
Traditionally, the infant frontal cortex was thought to develop late, with delayed synaptogenesis compared to sensory and language regions. Higher cognitive networks, such as the Multiple Demand (MD) network (Duncan and Owen, 2000; Duncan et al., 2020)- including dorsomedial frontal and lateral parietal cortices- were believed to activate late in development, alongside executive functions (EF). However, recent studies suggest earlier MD activity. Schettini et al. (2024) report MD network activation in children aged 4-12 years, and Ellis et al. (2021) show that frontal nodes of the MD network support attention in infants 3-20 months old.
In early months, infants must navigate new stimuli and environmental rules, requiring attentional processes and adaptive coding. These demands may engage the MD network, though its role in infancy remains understudied. This study investigates MD function in two-month-old infants and adults while they view the same movies. We tested whether the movies evoked similar activity time-courses across infants; whether these resembled adults' time-courses; and whether they could be explained by visual complexity. By exploring early neural foundations of EF, we prompt a re-evaluation of frontal cortex development.
Methods:
Infants (n1 = 134) were scanned at 2 months using a Siemens 3T MAGNETOM Prisma, measuring their BOLD response to six 22.5s movies known to engage infants, presented in one of six orders. Each movie was split into quarters (~5.6s) for analysis. Adult data (n2 = 17) were collected under the same conditions. Infant fMRI data were preprocessed using a custom Nipype pipeline; adult data via fMRIPrep (Esteban et al., 2019). Motion artefacts were addressed by excluding movie quarters with movement exceeding 50% of frames, yielding a final dataset of 126 infants and 16 adults. Visual complexity was quantified using entropy scores per video frame, calculated using Visual Complexity Analyzer (Menon et al., 2022). MD network regions of interest (ROIs) were defined, and a generalized linear model (GLM) was fit to individual runs, modelling each quarter video and extracting beta values within the MD network at the subject level. A second GLM with leave-one-infant-out cross-validation assessed whether individual infants' BOLD responses were best predicted by: (a) the responses of all other infants; (b) the responses of adults; or (c) the video's visual complexity. An analogous GLM was fitted to the adult data for comparison.
Results:
Preliminary results show that when modelling infant activity using infant-derived beta values, infants display widespread brain activation with strong inter-subject consistency, including engagement of the MD network. When modelling the adult-derived beta values in the MD network, infant brain activity localized to the lateral occipital cortex and parietal regions. Additionally, the strong association of entropy scores with visual cortex activity suggests that unlike for visual cortex, the MD activity is not related to the visual complexity of the stimuli. In the adult sample, no significant activity was found using infant-derived beta values, but adult-derived models showed limited cingulate cortex activation.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that two-month-old infants exhibit a shared neural response involving the MD network, unrelated to stimulus complexity, indicating possible higher-order processing. When modelled with adult-derived beta values, infant activation became more localized to occipital and parietal areas. Conversely, adults did not show significant MD activation when modelled with infant-derived beta values, though adult-derived models indicated cingulate cortex activation. These results imply that the movies engaged the MD network in infants, evoking early, higher-order processing, but were likely not engaging for adults, as evidenced by minimal adult activation.
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Executive Function, Cognitive Control and Decision Making
Lifespan Development:
Normal Brain Development: Fetus to Adolescence 1
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI) 2
fMRI Connectivity and Network Modeling
Novel Imaging Acquisition Methods:
BOLD fMRI
Keywords:
Cognition
Development
FUNCTIONAL MRI
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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Please indicate below if your study was a "resting state" or "task-activation” study.
Task-activation
Healthy subjects only or patients (note that patient studies may also involve healthy subjects):
Patients
Was this research conducted in the United States?
No
Were any human subjects research approved by the relevant Institutional Review Board or ethics panel?
NOTE: Any human subjects studies without IRB approval will be automatically rejected.
Yes
Were any animal research approved by the relevant IACUC or other animal research panel?
NOTE: Any animal studies without IACUC approval will be automatically rejected.
Not applicable
Please indicate which methods were used in your research:
Functional MRI
For human MRI, what field strength scanner do you use?
3.0T
Which processing packages did you use for your study?
Other, Please list
-
fMRIPrep, Nilearn, Nypipe
Provide references using APA citation style.
Duncan, J. (2000). Common regions of the human frontal lobe recruited by diverse cognitive demands. Trends in neurosciences, 23(10), 475-483.
Duncan, J. (2020). Integrated intelligence from distributed brain activity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(10), 838-852.
Ellis, C. T., (2021). Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(12), e2021474118.
Hiersche, K., Schettini, E., Li, J., & Saygin, Z. (2024). Functional dissociation of the language network and other cognition in early childhood. Human Brain Mapping, 45(9), e26757.
Menon, V. V., (2022). VCA: video complexity analyzer. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM multimedia systems conference(pp. 259-264).
Schettini, E., (2023). Individual variability in performance reflects selectivity of the multiple demand network among children and adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(11), 1940-1951.
No