Association of Neighborhood Opportunity with Infant Brain Activity and Cognitive Development.

Background And Objectives: Neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with lower neurocognitive scores and differences in brain structure among school-age children. Associations between positive neighborhood characteristics, infant brain activity, and cognitive development are underexplored. We examined direct and indirect associations between neighborhood opportunity, brain activity, and cognitive development.

A Qualitative Study of Maternal Perceptions of Stress and Parenting During Early Childhood.

Objective: Exposure to maternal stress in early childhood can increase risk for learning and behavior challenges. We sought to gain in-depth understanding of how mothers perceive stressors to impact child wellbeing and identify mothers' strategies for navigating stressors with their young children.

Methods: We recruited English- and Spanish-speaking mothers from a primary care clinic serving predominantly publicly insured children.

Exploratory study evaluating the relationships between perinatal adversity, oxidative stress, and infant neurodevelopment across the first year of life.

Early childhood adversity increases risk for negative lifelong impacts on health and wellbeing. Identifying the risk factors and the associated biological adaptations early in life is critical to develop scalable early screening tools and interventions. Currently, there are limited, reliable early childhood adversity measures that can be deployed prospectively, at scale, to assess risk in pediatric settings.

Association of cerebral metabolic rate following therapeutic hypothermia with 18-month neurodevelopmental outcomes after neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy.

Background: Therapeutic hypothermia (TH) is standard of care for moderate to severe neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) but many survivors still suffer lifelong disabilities and benefits of TH for mild HIE are under active debate. Development of objective diagnostics, with sensitivity to mild HIE, are needed to select, guide, and assess response to treatment. The objective of this study was to determine if cerebral oxygen metabolism (CMRO) in the days after TH is associated with 18-month neurodevelopmental outcomes as the first step in evaluating CMRO's potential as a diagnostic for HIE.

Associations between EEG trajectories, family income, and cognitive abilities over the first two years of life.

We sought to characterize developmental trajectories of EEG spectral power over the first 2 years after birth and examine whether family income or maternal education alter those trajectories. We analyzed EEGs (n = 161 infants, 534 EEGs) collected longitudinally between 2 and 24 months of age, and calculated frontal absolute power across 7 canonical frequency bands. For each frequency band, a piecewise growth curve model was fit, resulting in an estimated intercept and two slope parameters from 2 to 9 months and 9-24 months of age.

Maternal stress and development of infant attention to threat-related facial expressions.

Attentional biases to threat-related stimuli, such as fearful and angry facial expressions, are important to survival and emerge early in development. Infants demonstrate an attentional bias to fearful facial expressions by 5-7 months of age and an attentional bias toward anger by 3 years of age that are modulated by experiential factors. In a longitudinal study of 87 mother-infant dyads from families predominantly experiencing low income, we examined whether maternal stress and depressive symptoms were associated with trajectories of attentional biases to threat, assessed during an attention disengagement eye-tracking task when infants were 6-, 9-, and 12-month old.

Perinatal and early childhood biomarkers of psychosocial stress and adverse experiences.

The human brain develops through a complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences. During critical periods of development, experiences shape brain architecture, often with long-lasting effects. If experiences are adverse, the effects may include the risk of mental and physical disease, whereas positive environments may increase the likelihood of healthy outcomes.

Maternal Stress and Early Neurodevelopment: Exploring the Protective Role of Maternal Growth Mindset.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to test associations between maternal stress, maternal mindset, and infant neurodevelopment at 12 months of age. Specifically, we sought to examine the extent to which maternal growth mindsets may serve to attenuate the negative associations between maternal stress and infants' neurodevelopment.

Methods: The current exploratory study leverages data from a longitudinal cohort study following mother-infant dyads.

Maternal stress predicts neural responses during auditory statistical learning in 26-month-old children: An event-related potential study.

Exposure to high levels of early life stress have been associated with long-term difficulties in learning, behavior, and health, with particular impact evident in the language domain. While some have proposed that the increased stress of living in a low-income household mediates observed associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and child outcomes, considerable individual differences have been observed. The extent to which specific variables associated with socioeconomic status - in particular exposure to stressful life events - influence the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying language acquisition are not well understood.

Associations Between Maternal Stress, Early Language Behaviors, and Infant Electroencephalography During the First Year of Life.

Associations have been observed between socioeconomic status (SES) and language outcomes from early childhood, but individual variability is high. Exposure to high levels of stress, often associated with low-SES status, might influence how parents and infants interact within the early language environment. Differences in these early language behaviors, and in early neurodevelopment, might underlie SES-based differences in language that emerge later on.

Association of Perceived Maternal Stress During the Perinatal Period With Electroencephalography Patterns in 2-Month-Old Infants.

Importance: Variation in child responses to adversity creates a clinical challenge to identify children most resilient or susceptible to later risk for disturbances in cognition and health. Advances in establishing scalable biomarkers can lead to early identification and mechanistic understanding of the association of early adversity with neurodevelopment.

Objectives: To examine whether maternal reports of stress are associated with patterns in resting electroencephalography at 2 months of age and whether unique electroencephalographic profiles associated with risk and resiliency factors can be identified.

Past experience shapes ongoing neural patterns for language.

Early experiences may establish a foundation for later learning, however, influences of early language experience on later neural processing are unknown. We investigated whether maintenance of neural templates from early language experience influences subsequent language processing. Using fMRI, we scanned the following three groups performing a French phonological working memory (PWM) task: (1) monolingual French children; (2) children adopted from China before age 3 who discontinued Chinese and spoke only French; (3) Chinese-speaking children who learned French as a second language but maintained Chinese.

Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language.

Optimal periods during early development facilitate the formation of perceptual representations, laying the framework for future learning. A crucial question is whether such early representations are maintained in the brain over time without continued input. Using functional MRI, we show that internationally adopted (IA) children from China, exposed exclusively to French since adoption (mean age of adoption, 12.

Electrophysiological response to omitted stimulus in sentence processing.

The current study provides evidence that the absence of a syntactically expected item leads to a sustained cognitive processing demand. Event-related potentials were measured at the omission of a syntactically expected object argument in a speech sequence. English monolingual adults listened to paired sentences.

Losing face: impaired discrimination of featural and configural information in the mouth region of an inverted face.

Given that all faces share the same set of features-two eyes, a nose, and a mouth-that are arranged in similar configuration, recognition of a specific face must depend on our ability to discern subtle differences in its featural and configural properties. An enduring question in the face-processing literature is whether featural or configural information plays a larger role in the recognition process. To address this question, the face dimensions task was designed, in which the featural and configural properties in the upper (eye) and lower (mouth) regions of a face were parametrically and independently manipulated.

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by internationally adopted children from China.

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10-1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results from spontaneous and elicited speech showed that IA children acquired grammatical morphemes similarly to L1 learners; namely, (1) non-tense-marking morphemes were acquired earlier than tense-marking morphemes; (2) BE was acquired in synchrony with other tense-marking morphemes; and (3) a high percentage of omission errors and a low percentage of commission errors were observed.

The n250 brain potential to personally familiar and newly learned faces and objects.

Studies employing event-related potentials have shown that when participants are monitoring for a novel target face, the presentation of their own face elicits an enhanced negative brain potential in posterior channels approximately 250 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we investigate whether the own face N250 effect generalizes to other highly familiar objects, specifically, images of the participant's own dog and own car. In our experiments, participants were asked to monitor for a pre-experimentally unfamiliar target face (Joe), a target dog (Experiment 1: Joe's Dog) or a target car (Experiment 2: Joe's Car).

The neural plasticity of other-race face recognition.

Although it is well established that people are better at recognizing own-race faces than at recognizing other-race faces, the neural mechanisms mediating this advantage are not well understood. In this study, Caucasian participants were trained to differentiate African American (or Hispanic) faces at the individual level (e.g.

Perceptual other-race training reduces implicit racial bias.

Background: Implicit racial bias denotes socio-cognitive attitudes towards other-race groups that are exempt from conscious awareness. In parallel, other-race faces are more difficult to differentiate relative to own-race faces--the "Other-Race Effect." To examine the relationship between these two biases, we trained Caucasian subjects to better individuate other-race faces and measured implicit racial bias for those faces both before and after training.

Learning to become an expert: reinforcement learning and the acquisition of perceptual expertise.

To elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the development of perceptual expertise, we recorded ERPs while participants performed a categorization task. We found that as participants learned to discriminate computer generated "blob" stimuli, feedback modulated the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN)-an ERP component thought to reflect error evaluation within medial-frontal cortex. As participants improved at the categorization task, we also observed an increase in amplitude of an ERP component associated with object recognition (the N250).