ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN FACIAL PROCESSING NEURAL MARKERS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION ABILITIES IN 3-MONTH-OLD BABIES

• Grant number: 23/05322-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Psychiatry
• Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Shephard
• Grantee: José Frederico Rabelo Barbosa
• Host Institution: Instituto de Psiquiatria Doutor Antonio Carlos Pacheco e Silva (IPq). Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da USP (HCFMUSP). Secretaria da Saúde (São Paulo - Estado). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The development of social communication abilities in babies is a complex process in which the infant's interactions with the social environment shape the specialisation of neural systems responsible for processing social-communicative information. Previous studies with infants have identified neural markers associated with this process. For instance, an event-related potential component, the "N290", has been reliably reported while infants as young as 3 months of age view social (face) stimuli versus non-social stimuli. However, it is currently unclear whether these early neural markers of social processing are meaningfully related to the overt and more complex social-communication abilities of the infants. Therefore, the present study seeks to investigate associations between the N290 neural marker of face processing measured in a large sample of 500 3-month-old infants during an electroencephalography (EEG) recording and overt, adaptive, social-communication abilities of the infants assessed via parental interview at the same age. This project will make an important contribution to the developmental cognitive neuroscience literature by improving understanding of how neural markers of facial processing are related to overt social-communication abilities in very young infants.