Tasks and Results

The study. Previous studies found that infants' brain response differs when they see familiar vs unfamiliar faces on a screen and that this difference is changing over the course of the first year of life. Here we presented a whole range of faces resembling more mum's or a stranger's face to the child, to find out which of the faces elicits the strongest attention in the infant brain, whether this differs between younger and older infants, and how this relates to how they approach other tasks, how they engage in play and to their behaviour in daily life. This study uses EEG.

The results. The results revealed no significant group-level differences in attentional response for the parent's or the stranger's face, but 85% of infants displayed strong, individualised preferences for particular faces. This suggests that the absence of overall group preferences in traditional studies may be due to heterogeneous individual preferences rather than a lack of preference. Our findings suggest that even within this critical developmental period, infants show unique patterns of attention to faces, rather than following a uniform developmental trajectory. 

The full article has been recently accepted for publication in a peer review scientific journal, you can find the full paper here.

The study. Previous group studies found that infants' brain response differs when they look at a person engaging with them compared to a spinning toy. Here, we use EEG to study how the brain response is mapped onto a range of behaviours varying in the communicative cues they carry, which of these behaviours elicit the strongest response in the infant's social brain networks, and how this relates to how they approach other tasks, how they engage in play and to their behaviour in daily life. During the experiment, we computed a target brain signal that previously was indicated to signal infant attention, and the software aimed to predict the stimulus that maximally triggers this target brain signal. This study included infants aged 6-12 months.

The results. We expected infants to show the strongest target signal towards behaviours that we considered highly infant-directed (direct gaze combined with infant-directed speech). We found that infants did not have a group-level overall preference towards any specific kind of our stimuli. We also found that this is not due to a lack of preference, but due to heterogeneous individual preferences. Finally, which kind of stimulus maximised the target brain signal seemed to be related to parent-reported behaviour in social situations and parental affect. In specific, infants with more advanced skills in social relationships were more likely to show strongest attention during non-speech behaviours with averted gaze. This behaviour could have been interpreted by the infant as representing a joint attention situation, where the interaction partner is using their gaze to direct the infant's attention to something interesting. Further, infants of parents who experienced higher positive affect were more likely to show strongest attention when parents combined speech and direct gaze, as opposed to combinations of speech and averted gaze or non-speech and direct gaze. Our main take-home message is that individual differences seem to play a role in which aspect of live social interaction infants experience as most attention-capturing. 

The full article can be found here.

The study. Previous group studies found that infants' brain response differs when they look at faces with contrary facial expressions and gaze directions. In this study we used EEG to investigate which facial expressions and gaze direction in mum's face shown on the screen elicits the strongest attentional response in the infant brain, and to see how that varies across the different expressions and gaze directions in relation to how they engage during play and how they approach other tasks.

The results. Our AI-driven analysis showed that most infants’ brains were most strongly activated by their parents' grumpy faces with direct gaze, although infants showed varied preferences for other combinations of head and gaze direction and emotional expression. The data seem to suggest that infants who were most responsive to direct gaze tended to have a more positive emotional disposition and lower levels of negative emotions. This individualised approach reveals that we can reliably measure each infant's unique social preferences and shows the potential of using this approach to study unique paths in brain development.

The full article can be found here.

Are infants' preferences for social cues stable or do they change based on experience? Can we use our personalised approach to evaluate whether the brain respond similarly to similar stimuli? By inviting infants twice into the lab, we will record whether infant's preference for a specific emotional expression and gaze direction in the parents face changes from one week to the other. 

In this study, we will examine the link between infant's brain responses to their parent's faces is associated to their usual exposure to faces in their daily life environment and to their interaction style with their parents. This study will help us understand what are the typical mechanisms underlying the specialisation of brain pathways supporting social attention, and enhance our understanding of atypical developmental trajectories in children who are not typically exposed to faces (for example, those with visual impairment).