Developmental Neuroscience Methods

Question 1

Harlow (1950’s)

Answer 1

Maternal separation and social isolation experiments. Demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development.

Question 2

Brazelton et al (1960’s)

Answer 2

Development of the new-born assessment scale. His scale allows you to measure the competencies of the infant. Shifting perspectives to believe more that new-borns were born with 9 months of experience when they are born. Focus on the strengths of the infant and what they can do rather than what they can’t.

Question 3

Mosso (1846-1910)

Answer 3

Subject lay on a balanced table which could tilt towards the head or the feet. When there was ‘emotional or intellectual’ activity in the subject, the balance would tilt towards the head end because of the redistribution of blood in the system.

Question 4

Arichi et al (2012)

Answer 4

fMRI change in BOLD signals with age. Peak amplitude, response onset, duration and morphology of after-shoot differ in adults and young infants. The implication of this is that standard adult analysis of fMRI with a predefined HRF model may not be accurate for an infant. This means we need to adopt more general analysis strategies for infants and model a time series of the cohort we have rather than the standard.

Question 5

Rutherford (2001)

Answer 5

The clinical manifestation of neurological diseases and many neural structures that later govern the highest cognitive activities are subtle and/or functionally silent in infants. The structural-functional disconnect is even more pronounced in premature new-borns. There has been a response to the need for higher resolution imaging of the neonatal brain in the form of an explosion of research and application of such imaging.

Question 6

Tramo et al (1996)

Answer 6

MRI study investigating the variation in cortical surface areas of grey matter using identical twins aged 18-43, 5 male and 5 female pairs. Total cortical surface areas across pairs was similar accounting for differences in body weight. But regional differences in cortical surface area were evident across pairs particularly in the left hemisphere so twins were more similar to each other than other ppts. They suggest these differences in regional size and shape take form during fissuration and gyral development which are changes in the surface morphology. While we know much of this happens in utero, it was less clear how this changed during childhood and adolescence.

Question 7

Shaw et al (2006)

Answer 7

MRI study of adolescents (ages 7-19). They found that trajectory of changes in cortical thickness predicts IQ and not thickness itself. Cortical thickness is more associated with IQ in later childhood. Although cortical thickness is shown to predict IQ, this is not an absolute measure as the extent to which it predicts it is changing over time.

Question 8

Katus et al (2020) (2022)

Answer 8

They are measuring habituation and novelty detection using the auditory oddball paradigm. It was a longitudinal study with UK 1 month and 5 month olds in either the Gambia or the UK. They looked at EEG specifically the P3 response as it is used as an attention marker across lots of studies. Uniform decrease of P3 to infrequent white noise sounds in both cohorts at 5 months. Increase in P3 to trial unique/novelty detection sounds between 1 and 5 months. There was more attention paid to infrequent sounds at 1 compared to 5 months and more attention paid to trial unique sounds at 5 compared to 1 month.

Developmental trajectories to 18 months. There are differences is developmental trajectories between children from the UK and the Gambia. Implies there are some environmental influences on novelty detection so attention.

Question 9

Colombo (1993)

Answer 9

Rate of habituation predicts later outcomes in childhood on standardised cognitive assessments

Question 10

Baird et al (2002)

Answer 10

Studied object permanence which is the ability to understand that something still exists when you can no longer see it. Longitudinal study of 5-12 month olds studied monthly. They were allowed to play with a toy, then it was hidden, then they had to wait 3 seconds and then were allowed to search for it. They used a frontal placement of Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) array. They found object permanence was achieved at 6-8 months. Before this time, the infant forgets the object exists in the 3 second delay.