Lisa Sarah Scott - US grants

Before six months of age, infants readily perceive differences between faces within both familiar (e.g., own-race) and unfamiliar (e.g., other-race) groups. Importantly, by 9 months of age, they have lost ability for perceiving differences between other-race faces. This loss in perceptual ability is called "perceptual narrowing" and is theoretically driven by the experiences infants have interacting with some groups of people more than others. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Lisa Scott, working at the University of Massachusetts, is carrying out research to understand how perceptual experience and brain maturation interact during infancy to result in brain and face recognition specialization. During a brief period of infancy, perceptual biases are formed, apparently, leading to long-lasting deficits in face recognition and identification of individuals within unfamiliar or less frequently encountered groups. Recent research suggests that perceptual narrowing arises when infants do not learn to associate individual names, such as "Sue" or "Bob," with people of other races. Faces from racial groups with which infants do not interact, faces that remain nameless, are perceived as one undifferentiated category. Dr. Scott is investigating how different perceptual experiences influence the development of underlying brain regions responsible for face perception and face processing biases, which lead to difficulties identifying and remembering people within another race and to difficulties perceiving and interpreting social and emotional face information. Dr. Scott hypothesizes that learning the names of faces or objects at the individual level rather than at the category level leads to qualitatively distinct brain representations and more discriminative behavioral responses. She expects that perceptual narrowing is driven primarily by experience and not brain maturation. In her studies, infants and their families receive books with labeled images of faces and objects, and the families are asked to read these books to their infants for three months. Infant learning is examined by measuring whether or not infants of different ages can differentiate between trained and new images never seen before, and by using eye tracking to measure where they focus on the images. Brain activity is recorded before and after training to determine whether learning names influences neural responses to faces and objects. Dr. Scott predicts that learning the names of faces also results in enhanced development of face processing beyond face recognition, including emotion and gaze perception.

While much is known about brain maturation within the first year of life, less is known about how experience and learning affect specialized neural responses and abilities. The results of this project are expected to lead to a better understanding of how infants tune their perceptual systems in an ever-changing world, and how specific early experiences influence later perceptual abilities. The outcome of this research is expected to have implications in the area of developmental disorders such as Autism, and in the understanding of social interactions and social biases. Understanding the development of face recognition can help explain relationships between race perception and social prejudice. The results can be used to inform parents, educators, and policy makers about perceptual learning and the role of experience on the developing brain. Cognitive neuroscience methods are becoming increasingly important tools in infant development research, so the next generation of scientists need expertise with these techniques. Dr. Scott is implementing a summer research experience program that aims to introduce high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students to scientific inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and methods used to study brain development. This program aims to assist aspiring young scientists in developing their academic and career goals, facilitate and encourage students to form mentoring relationships and networks, and teach students about the importance of community outreach, education, and the responsible dissemination and communication of research findings.

Understanding how to provide quality learning experiences for children is a priority for parents, educators, clinicians, and policymakers. Significant effort has been put into designing formal educational programs that promote and support learning. However, there is surprisingly little known about learning during the most rapid period of developmental change, the first year of life. Long before infants speak, the words they hear contribute to detailed perceptual and conceptual representations of the surrounding world, but we still know little about how the brain changes in early infancy and how to best support infants' learning. These gaps in our knowledge limit the extent to which we can develop and optimize evidence-based early learning programs. The primary goal of this project is to uncover critical environmental factors that promote behavioral and brain development, as well as foundational learning skills during infancy. Knowledge gained from this research will advance our understanding of the building blocks of learning and how caregivers can best support development in the first year of life.

Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs and a constellation of EEG (electroencephalography) methods, this research will determine the extent to which neural responses, indicative of learning, change and specialize over time and with experience. Specifically, the brain responses of 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants will be measured before, during, and after a learning period. During the learning period, infants will be shown faces or objects and hear names, labels, or sounds. The first goal of this work is to examine the impact of label learning on visual perception of faces and objects. The second goal is to better characterize neural specialization and development across the first year of life. Finally, the third goal is to identify the most robust and reliable EEG markers of infant learning by examining differences both within and across individual infants at different ages. The results of this project could transform our understanding of the trajectory of infant learning and the link between language development and perceptual development in the first year of life. This knowledge is critical for providing infants with a supportive learning environment that promotes behavioral and brain development as well as key foundational skills important for later learning.

PROJECT SUMMARY Shared book reading has been found to have broad developmental benefits for language, socio-emotional and cognitive development. However, the effects of shared book reading on infant development are not well understood. Although healthcare professionals and educators ask parents to read books to their infants early and often, the book reading experience itself has never been systematically investigated in infancy. This work is guided by two specific aims and is expected to result in a better understanding of the effectiveness of shared book reading as a tool for supporting parent-infant interactions and infant learning across the first year of life. The first aim of the proposed research is to determine the extent to which infant and parent visual attentional coupling during shared book reading predicts later: a) infant selective attention and b) infant and parent neural coupling. The second aim of the proposed work is to determine the extent to which books with individually-named characters (e.g., ?Boris?, ?Fiona?) increases parent-infant joint attention and infant selective attention relative to books with generic labels (e.g., ?Bear?, ?Bear?) or no labels and whether attention differs by age. To address the aims of this project, a cross-sectional sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants and their parents will come to the laboratory and read a book that includes three distinct character labeling conditions (individual names, generic category labels, no label). During infant-parent shared book reading joint attention will be measured using dual eye-tracking. Infants and parents will then return to the lab the next day and infant selective attention and infant-parent neural synchrony will be measured using EEG frequency tagging while infants and their parent view familiar characters across labeling conditions as well as unfamiliar characters. If the aims of the proposed research are achieved, we will have determined the extent to which parent-infant joint attention prompts subsequent selective processing of book content in 6-, 9-, and 12-month old infants. This study will also be the first to record dual infant and parent high density EEG during an experimental task and use neural synchrony as an outcome measure. The dual eye-tracking and EEG findings will allow for a better understanding of dyadic interactions between infants and parents. Finally, we expect that this investigation will show benefits of early shared book reading for infant development. Our long term goal is to use this data to support the inclusion of early shared book reading in early prevention programs targeting those at risk for poor health outcomes or developmental disabilities.

Project Summary/Abstract Neurodevelopmental processes are shaped by dynamic interactions between genes and environments. Maladaptive experiences early in life can alter developmental trajectories, leading to harmful and enduring developmental sequelae. Pre- and postnatal hazards include maternal substance exposure, toxicant exposures in pregnancy and early life, maternal health conditions, parental psychopathology, maltreatment, structural racism, and excessive stress. To elucidate how various environmental hazards impact child development, it is imperative that a normative template of developmental trajectories over the first 10 years of life be established based on a sufficiently large and demographically diverse sample of the US population. To accomplish this, the Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium (HBCD-NC) has been formed to deploy a harmonized, optimized, and innovative set of neuroimaging (MRI, EEG) measures complemented by an extensive battery of behavioral, physiological, and psychological tools, and biospecimens to understand neurodevelopmental trajectories in a sample of 7,500 mothers and infants enrolled at 24 sites across the United States (US). The HBCD-NC will carry out a common research protocol under direction of the HBCD- NC Administrative Core (HCAC) and will assemble and distribute a comprehensive and well-curated research dataset to the scientific community at large under the direction of the HBCD-NC Data Coordinating Center (HDCC). The overarching goal of the HBCD-NC is to create a comprehensive, harmonized, and high- dimensional dataset that will characterize typical neurodevelopmental trajectories in US children and that will assess how biological and environmental exposures affect those trajectories. A special emphasis will be placed on understanding the impact of pre- and postnatal exposure to opioids, marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and/or other substances. To address these broad objectives, the sample of women enrolled will include: 1) a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse cohort that is representative of the US population; 2) pregnant woman with use of targeted substances (opioids, marijuana, alcohol, tobacco); and 3) demographically and behaviorally similar women without substance use in pregnancy to enable valid causal inferences. In addition, the HBCD-NC will identify key developmental windows during which both harmful and protective environments have the most influence on later neurodevelopmental outcomes. The large, multi- modal, longitudinal, and generalizable dataset that will be produced for the first time by this study will provide novel insights into child development using state-of-the-art methods. The HBCD-NC study will inform public policy to improve the health and development of children across the nation.