Publications by authors named "Maria Crespo-Llado"

There is a scarcity of prospective longitudinal research targeted at early postnatal life which maps developmental pathways of early-stage processing and brain specialisation in the context of early adversity. Follow up from infancy into the one-five year age range is key, as it constitutes a critical gap between infant and early childhood studies. Availability of portable neuroimaging (functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG)) has enabled access to rural settings increasing the diversity of our sampling and broadening developmental research to include previously underrepresented ethnic-racial and geographical groups in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs).

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Introduction: Early childhood development forms the foundations for functioning later in life. Thus, accurate monitoring of developmental trajectories is critical. However, such monitoring often relies on time-intensive assessments which necessitate administration by skilled professionals.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study looks at how different family setups around the world affect how babies learn to talk and interact with people.
  • Researchers focused on babies in The Gambia and the UK, using recordings to see how much and what kind of talk babies hear from their caregivers.
  • They found that having many different caregivers in a household can change how babies learn to communicate with others.
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Interest in measuring cognition in children in low-resourced settings has increased in recent years, but options for cognitive assessments are limited. Researchers are faced with challenges when using existing assessments in these settings, such as trained workforce shortages, less relevant testing stimuli, limitations of proprietary assessments, and inadequate parental knowledge of cognitive milestones. Tablet-based direct child assessments are emerging as a practical solution to these challenges, but evidence of their validity and utility in cross-cultural settings is limited.

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Article Synopsis
  • Traditional neuroimaging methods struggle to study the cortical function of awake infants, leading to the increased use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has notable limitations in resolution and ergonomics.
  • Recent advancements in high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) technology address many of these fNIRS limitations, allowing for better spatial resolution and specificity in imaging the infant brain.
  • A study utilizing HD-DOT demonstrates its capability to produce high-quality functional images of infants' brains during social stimulus tasks, showing improved response consistency and tolerability in infants compared to previous low-density fNIRS methods.
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Infants are sensitive to and converge emotionally with peers' distress. It is unclear whether these responses extend to positive affect and whether observing peer emotions motivates infants' behaviors. This study investigates 8-month-olds' asymmetric frontal EEG during peers' cry and laughter, and its relation to approach and withdrawal behaviors.

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Measures of working memory capacity (WMC) are extremely popular, yet we know relatively little about the specific processes that support recall. We focused on children's and adults' ability to use contextual support to access working memory representations that might otherwise not be reported. Children ( N = 186, 5-10 years) and adults ( N = 64) completed a listening span task and a delayed recall task with semantic probes or cues.

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Infants' ability to process others' emotional expressions is fundamental for their social development. While infants' processing of emotions expressed by faces and speech has been more extensively investigated, less is known about how infants process non-verbal vocalizations of emotions. Here, we recorded frontal N100, P200, and LPC event-related potentials (ERPs) from 8-month-old infants listening to sounds of other infants crying, laughing, and coughing.

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Viewing facial expressions often evokes facial responses in the observer. These spontaneous facial reactions (SFRs) are believed to play an important role for social interactions. However, their developmental trajectory and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms are still little understood.

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