Abstract
Differences in looking at the eyes of others are one of the earliest behavioral markers for social difficulties in neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism. However, it is unknown how early visuo-social experiences relate to the maturation of infant brain networks that process visual social stimuli. We investigated functional connectivity (FC) within the ventral visual object pathway as a contributing neural system. Densely sampled, longitudinal eye-tracking and resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data were collected from infant rhesus macaques, an important model of human social development, from birth through 6 months of age. Mean trajectories were fit for both datasets and individual trajectories from subjects with both eye-tracking and rs-fMRI data were used to test for brain-behavior relationships. Exploratory findings showed infants with greater increases in FC between left V1 to V3 visual areas have an earlier increase in eye-looking before 2 months. This relationship was moderated by social status such that infants with low social status had a stronger association between left V1 to V3 connectivity and eye-looking than high status infants. Results indicated that maturation of the visual object pathway may provide an important neural substrate supporting adaptive transitions in social visual attention during infancy.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 101213 |
Journal | Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience |
Volume | 60 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH, United States of America (USA)) grant numbers MH100029, MH078105–01S1, MH078105–04S1, MH119251, MH091645, MH086633, MH096773, K99/R00 MH091238, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA) U54 HD079124, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (USA) EB027147, National Library of Medicine (USA) T15LM007088, the Oregon Clinical and Translational Institute (USA, grant number CTSA UL1TR000128), the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, the Lynne and Andrew Redleaf Foundation, and the NIH's Office of the Director, Office of Research Infrastructure Programs, P51OD011132 (Emory National Primate Research Center (ENPRC) Base Grant). The ENPRC is fully accredited by AAALAC, International.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH, United States of America (USA)) grant numbers MH100029, MH078105–01S1, MH078105–04S1, MH119251, MH091645, MH086633, MH096773, K99/R00 MH091238 , Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA) U54 HD079124 , National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (USA) EB027147 , National Library of Medicine (USA) T15LM007088 , the Oregon Clinical and Translational Institute (USA, grant number CTSA UL1TR000128 ), the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain , the Lynne and Andrew Redleaf Foundation , and the NIH’s Office of the Director , Office of Research Infrastructure Programs, P51OD011132 (Emory National Primate Research Center (ENPRC) Base Grant). The ENPRC is fully accredited by AAALAC, International.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
Keywords
- Brain-behavior associations
- Infant development
- Nonhuman primate
- Resting state fMRI
- Social attention
- Visual object pathway