Infant neural sensitivity to eye gaze depends on early experience of gaze communication.
View / Open Files
Publication Date
2018-11Journal Title
Dev Cogn Neurosci
ISSN
1878-9293
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Volume
34
Pages
1-6
Language
eng
Type
Article
Physical Medium
Print-Electronic
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Vernetti, A., Ganea, N., Tucker, L., Charman, T., Johnson, M., & Senju, A. (2018). Infant neural sensitivity to eye gaze depends on early experience of gaze communication.. Dev Cogn Neurosci, 34 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2018.05.007
Abstract
A fundamental question in functional brain development is how the brain acquires specialised processing optimised for its individual environment. The current study is the first to demonstrate that distinct experience of eye gaze communication, due to the visual impairment of a parent, affects the specificity of brain responses to dynamic gaze shifts in infants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) from 6 to 10 months old sighted infants with blind parents (SIBP group) and control infants with sighted parents (CTRL group) were recorded while they observed a face with gaze shifting Toward or Away from them. Unlike the CTRL group, ERPs of the SIBP group did not differentiate between the two directions of gaze shift. Thus, selective brain responses to perceived gaze shifts in infants may depend on their eye gaze communication experience with the primary caregiver. This finding highlights the critical role of early communicative experience in the emerging functional specialisation of the human brain.
Keywords
Humans, Eye Movements, Communication, Evoked Potentials, Fixation, Ocular, Infant, Female, Male
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2018.05.007
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/279561
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.