Publications by authors named "Olivia Allison"

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the relationship between the maturation of auditory pathways in infants and the timing of their auditory responses as measured by brain imaging techniques.
  • Researchers analyzed data from a group of typically developing infants and toddlers, using diffusion-weighted MRI to assess white matter structure and magnetoencephalography for auditory response latency.
  • Results show that improved myelination and structure of auditory pathways correlate with faster auditory response times, suggesting that changes in brain circuitry occur rapidly during early development.
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In school-age children, the myelination of the auditory radiation thalamocortical pathway is associated with the latency of auditory evoked responses, with the myelination of thalamocortical axons facilitating the rapid propagation of acoustic information. Little is known regarding this auditory system function-structure association in infants and toddlers. The present study tested the hypothesis that maturation of auditory radiation white-matter microstructure (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • The auditory system of infants matures quickly in the first few years, aiming to create accurate perceptions of sounds in their environment.
  • Researchers studied how the left and right auditory cortex develop in typically developing infants using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure brain responses to sounds in 114 infants and toddlers.
  • The study found that the left hemisphere matures faster than the right, resulting in similar processing speeds by around 21 months, and that this left hemisphere maturation is linked to better language skills in older infants.
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Infant and young child electrophysiology studies have provided information regarding the maturation of face-encoding neural processes. A limitation of previous research is that very few studies have examined face-encoding processes in children 12-48 months of age, a developmental period characterized by rapid changes in the ability to encode facial information. The present study sought to fill this gap in the literature a longitudinal study examining the maturation of a primary node in the face-encoding network-the left and right fusiform gyrus (FFG).

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There is an increasing interest in alpha-range rhythms in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in relation to perceptual and attentional processes. The infant mu rhythm has been extensively studied in the context of linkages between action observation and action production in infancy, but less is known about the mu rhythm in relation to cross-modal processes involving somatosensation. We investigated differences in mu responses to cued vibrotactile stimulation of the hand in two age groups of infants: From 6 to 7 months and 13 to 14 months.

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