Using broadband near-infrared spectroscopy to measure the functioning of the social brain in infancy

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Over the first five years of life, infants transition from being passive recipients of care to active shapers of their social world. Over this time, they develop and deploy a broad range of social skills that include language, imitation, empathy, cooperation, turn-taking, and imaginative play. How do they do this? Whilst we have mapped the behavioral development of these skills in exquisite detail, our understanding of the changes in the brain that underpin their development is in its infancy. This is important because disruptions in social brain development are implicated in disorders like autism, shyness, and anxiety. Our progress has been limited by the methods we have employed. Traditional brain imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can only be used in young, sleeping infants while electroencephalography (EEG) is only sensitive to temporal but not spatial aspects of brain activity. Our understanding of social brain development has thus far often focused on the processing of static faces in young infants, a long way from the sophisticated behaviors that toddlers develop. To move forward, a new way of measuring holistic brain responses needs to be developed, in naturalistic contexts from infancy to toddlerhood.With this ESRC Fellowship, I intend to extend the work that I started during my Ph.D. in order to develop a new way to measure brain responses. More specifically, I developed and tested the use of a novel system to record multiple aspects of brain function simultaneously. Namely, it combines functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure changes in blood flow to specific brain regions, broadband near-infrared spectroscopy (bNIRS) to measure cellular changes occurring within the mitochondria of cells and EEG to measure temporally accurate, coordinated activity of large groups of neurons. I demonstrated that this system could be used to obtain measures of activity in the social brain in both infants at high and low- risk for autism. During this Fellowship, I aim toa) Develop an advanced data analysis pipeline in order to combine all the measures from this system to obtain a holistic understanding of the functioning of the social brain. Following this, I aim to write papers to disseminate this research to the scientific community.b) To collect data using this system on a larger sample of infants at high-risk for autism.c) Develop grant proposals for further funding to allow integration of this system into a number of different research projects investigating complex brain mechanisms.d) To disseminate this research to the public by organising a public engagement event.