Cortical route for facelike pattern processing in human newborns
Cortical route for facelike pattern processing in human newborns
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1812419116
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发表时间：
2019-03-05
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Vallortigara, Giorgio
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Buiatti, Marco;Di Giorgio, Elisa;Vallortigara, Giorgio
人类被赋予了一种特殊的面部识别能力，这种能力在成年人中得到了一组面部特异性皮层斑块的支持。人类新生儿在出生后不久就优先选择面部，即使它们以高度示意性的几何图案的形式呈现，而不是感知上等效的非面部刺激。这种早期偏好背后的神经基础在很大程度上仍未被探索。成人面部特异性皮层回路在出生时是否已经活跃，或者其专业化是否随着经验和/或成熟而缓慢发展？我们测量了 1 至 4 天清醒、专注的人类新生儿对示意性面部模式和非面部控制刺激的脑电图反应，在频率标记设计中以缓慢振荡的“躲猫猫”动态（0.8 Hz）直观地呈现。尽管新生儿注意力的持续时间有限，但可以根据刺激频率处的脑电图功率谱峰值来估计每个刺激的可靠的频率标记反应。在大量电极中，直立的面部刺激比倒置的面部刺激引起了明显更强的频率标记反应。底层皮质活动的源重建揭示了部分右侧化网络的募集，该网络包括与成人面部处理回路重叠的外侧枕颞和内侧顶叶区域。这一结果表明，专门负责面部处理的皮质路径在出生时就已经发挥了功能。
Humans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that, in adults, is supported by a set of facespecific cortical patches. Human newborns, already shortly after birth, preferentially orient to faces, even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometrical patterns vs. perceptually equivalent nonfacelike stimuli. The neural substrates underlying this early preference are still largely unexplored. Is the adult face-specific cortical circuit already active at birth, or does its specialization develop slowly as a function of experience and/or maturation? We measured EEG responses in 1- to 4-day-old awake, attentive human newborns to schematic facelike patterns and nonfacelike control stimuli, visually presented with slow oscillatory "peekaboo" dynamics (0.8 Hz) in a frequency-tagging design. Despite the limited duration of newborns' attention, reliable frequency-tagged responses could be estimated for each stimulus from the peak of the EEG power spectrum at the stimulation frequency. Upright facelike stimuli elicited a significantly stronger frequency-tagged response than inverted facelike controls in a large set of electrodes. Source reconstruction of the underlying cortical activity revealed the recruitment of a partially right-lateralized network comprising lateral occipitotemporal and medial parietal areas overlapping with the adult face-processing circuit. This result suggests that the cortical route specialized in face processing is already functional at birth.