Prefrontal Cortical Involvement in Young Infants' Analysis of Novelty
Prefrontal Cortical Involvement in Young Infants' Analysis of Novelty
复制标题
DOI：
10.1093/cercor/bhn096
复制
发表时间：
2009-02-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Taga, Gentaro
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nakano, Tamami;Watanabe, Hama;Taga, Gentaro
我们对婴儿感知和认知的认识主要是基于习惯化和不习惯化，但这些过程本身的潜在神经机制尚不清楚。有人认为，习惯化与在中枢神经系统中建立重复刺激的内部表征有关，而不习惯化则与对新事物和事件的关注增加有关。这导致了一种假设，即一个分布式网络，包括年幼婴儿的感觉、联想和前额皮质区域，参与了这些过程，与经典的发展观点相反，前额皮质功能的开始是延迟的。本文采用多通道近红外光谱技术研究了3月龄婴儿颞叶和前额叶听觉习惯化和听觉不习惯化相关的时空血流动力学反应的时间演变。我们发现，在重复的听觉刺激下，颞区仍然处于激活状态；然而，前额叶区域表现出与新刺激相关的阶段性激活。颞叶和前额叶区域之间的分离激活模式表明，不同的皮层区域在听觉习惯化和听觉不习惯化中起着不同的功能作用，前额叶皮层参与了婴儿早期对周围环境的不变或新奇的感知。
Our knowledge of infant perception and cognition is primarily based on habituation and dishabituation, but the underlying neural mechanisms for these processes per se remain unclear. It has been argued that habituation is related to building internal representations of repeated stimuli in the central nervous system, whereas dishabituation is related to an increased attention to novel items and events. This leads to a hypothesis that a distributed network including the sensory, association and prefrontal cortical regions of young infants is involved in those processes, in contrast with the classical developmental view that onset of the functioning of the prefrontal cortex is delayed. Here we examined the time evolution of spatio-temporal hemodynamic responses related to the auditory habituation and dishabituation in the temporal and prefrontal regions of 3-month-old infants by using multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy. We found that the temporal regions remained activated by repetitive auditory stimuli; however, the prefrontal regions exhibited phasic activation in relation to novel stimuli. The dissociated activation pattern between the temporal and prefrontal regions suggests that distinct cortical regions play distinct functional roles in auditory habituation and dishabituation, and that the prefrontal cortex is involved in perceiving invariance or novelty of the immediate environment in early infancy.