Face Processing in newborns
Newborns show a remarkable ability to detect faces even minutes after birth, an ecologically fundamental skill that is instrumental for interacting with their conspecifics. What are the neural bases of this expertise? Using EEG and a slow oscillatory visual stimulation based on a Frequency-Tagging design, we identified a reliable response specific to facelike patterns in newborns, for which underlying cortical sources overlap with the adult face-specific cortical circuit. This suggests that the development of face perception in infants might rely on an early cortical route specialized in face processing already shortly after birth.
Cortical response to facelike patterns, Buiatti et al., 2019
Comparison between upright vs. inverted faces. (A) Statistical map of the difference between the brain response to upright vs. inverted faces. Response to faces is significantly stronger in posterior (Pcorr < 0.003) and right frontal (Pcorr < 0.049) clusters of electrodes. (B) Power spectrum averaged over the posterior cluster for the two conditions: the tag frequency peak for upright faces is clearly higher than the one for inverted faces. (C) Statistical map of the comparison of upright vs. inverted faces at the source level, revealing a right-lateralized network that partly overlaps with the adult face-processing network. (D) Intersubject correlation between the facelike pattern response in the posterior cluster and the age from birth.
Reference:
Buiatti M, Di Giorgio E, Piazza M, Polloni C, Menna G, Taddei F, Baldo E, Vallortigara G,
Cortical route for facelike pattern processing in human newborns,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (2019).