Longitudinal assessments of functional near-infrared spectroscopy background functional connectivity in low- and middle-income infants during a social cognition task.

Shortly after birth, human infants demonstrate behavioral selectivity to social stimuli. However, the neural underpinnings of this selectivity are largely unknown. Here, we examine patterns of functional connectivity to determine how regions of the brain interact while processing social stimuli and how these interactions change during the first 2 years of life.

Watching talking faces: The development of cortical representation of visual syllables in infancy.

From birth, we perceive speech by hearing and seeing people talk. In adults cortical representations of visual speech are processed in the putative temporal visual speech area (TVSA), but it remains unknown how these representations develop. We measured infants' cortical responses to silent visual syllables and non-communicative mouth movements using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Towards imaging the infant brain at play.

Infants' first-person experiences are crucial to early cognitive and neural development. To a vast extent, these early experiences involve play, which in infancy takes the form of object exploration. While at the behavioral level infant play has been studied both using specific tasks and in naturalistic scenarios, the neural correlates of object exploration have largely been studied in highly controlled task settings.

The Development of Cortical Responses to the Integration of Audiovisual Speech in Infancy.

In adults, the integration of audiovisual speech elicits specific higher (super-additive) or lower (sub-additive) cortical responses when compared to the responses to unisensory stimuli. Although there is evidence that the fronto-temporal network is active during perception of audiovisual speech in infancy, the development of fronto-temporal responses to audiovisual integration remains unknown. In the current study, 5-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched bimodal (audiovisual) and alternating unimodal (auditory + visual) syllables.

Cognitive development: Looking for perceptual awareness in human infants.

The extent to which young human infants are conscious, in the sense of being perceptually aware of their environment, has been long debated. A new study has revealed that infants do exhibit a key signature of consciousness - the attentional blink - but this early consciousness changes with age.

Empathic Responses for Pain in Facial Muscles Are Modulated by Actor's Attractiveness and Gender, and Perspective Taken by Observer.

Although empathy for pain is an often studied phenomenon, only few studies employing electromyography (EMG) have investigated either emotional responses to the pain of others or factors that modulate these responses. The present study investigated whether the sex and attractiveness of persons experiencing pain affected muscle activity associated with empathy for pain, the (CS) and (OO) muscles, in male and female participants in two conditions: adopting a perspective of "the other" or "the self." Fifty one participants (27 females) watched movies showing situations that included the expression of pain, with female and male and more and less attractive actors under both conditions, while the CS and OO EMG were recorded.