An electroencephalography study of the neural correlates of visual habituation in infants with hearing loss

听力损失婴儿视觉习惯神经相关性的脑电图研究

• 批准号: ES/X001946/1
• 负责人: Claire Monroy
• 金额: $ 30.81万
• 依托单位: Keele University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FX001946%2F1
• 关键词: electroencephalography; study; neural; correlates; visual

The goal of this research project is to compare brain development between babies who are deaf, and babies with normal hearing while they see and process a novel visual stimulus. Past research has shown that babies and children with hearing loss perform less well on commonly used tests of nonverbal cognition, such as attention, working memory, and learning. These findings have led scientists to believe that hearing loss negatively affects cognitive development, in addition to causing difficulties with language development. However, there are several crucial gaps in this research: first, simply demonstrating a difference in performance does not allow us to infer the underlying brain mechanisms that cause the difference. In this case, we still do not know whether the difference reflects a deficit, as hypothesized, or whether it could reflect an adaptation of the deaf infants to their unusual sensory environment. Secondly, most of the prior research has been done with older children and not babies. This project will be the first to examine the brain activity that underlies early cognitive development in babies who are born with hearing loss. This knowledge is crucial for understanding how hearing and hearing loss affect brain and cognitive development in babies. To achieve this goal, this project will build upon a previous study that tested visual habitation in deaf and hearing babies. Visual habituation is a well-established phenomenon that reflects information processing: babies will eventually lose interest in a visual stimulus that is continuously shown to them. Initially, they will be very interested, as infants are generally curious about the world around them, but after a while they will lose interest and stop looking at it. This is because they have fully encoded a memory for the stimulus and there is no longer any new information to learn. In a recent study by the Principal Investigator, deaf babies took longer to habituate to a new visual stimulus (a colourful object) compared to a group of hearing babies of the same age. The main interpretation of these findings, based on the assumptions discussed earlier, is that the deaf infants are slower to encode the visual information into memory and therefore slower to habituate. However, it could also be that the deaf babies are slower to habituate because they are, in fact, encoding a stronger memory for the object or showing deeper sustained attention to visual stimuli. These alternative possibilities would also lead to longer looking times. Therefore, we cannot infer the underlying brain processes that cause the observed differences between deaf and hearing infants from behavioural measures alone. In other words, the underlying reasons for differences in visual processing in deaf infants may not be reflected in observable infant behaviour, making them ideally suited for neuroimaging methods. This research study will use electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity during visual habituation in order to arbitrate between these competing hypotheses about why we have observed differences between deaf and hearing infants in visual processing.This research project will also examine whether measures of brain development in young infants are related to their language development one year later. This information will be crucial in helping families and clinicians understand the developmental trajectories of babies with hearing loss and those with normal hearing. The findings from this project will be shared with families via a community workshop and will be shared with the academic and medical communities through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences.

这个研究项目的目标是比较失聪婴儿和听力正常婴儿在看到和处理新的视觉刺激时的大脑发育。过去的研究表明，听力损失的婴儿和儿童在常用的非语言认知测试中表现不佳，如注意力，工作记忆和学习。这些发现使科学家们相信，听力损失除了对语言发展造成困难外，还会对认知发展产生负面影响。然而，这项研究存在几个关键的空白：首先，仅仅证明表现的差异并不能让我们推断出导致差异的潜在大脑机制。在这种情况下，我们仍然不知道这种差异是否反映了假设的缺陷，或者它是否反映了失聪婴儿对他们不寻常的感觉环境的适应。其次，大多数先前的研究都是针对年龄较大的儿童而不是婴儿进行的。该项目将是第一个研究大脑活动的项目，该活动是先天性听力损失婴儿早期认知发展的基础。这些知识对于理解听力和听力损失如何影响婴儿的大脑和认知发育至关重要。为了实现这一目标，该项目将建立在以前的研究，测试聋人和听力婴儿的视觉栖息地。视觉习惯化是一种反映信息处理的公认现象：婴儿最终会对持续显示给他们的视觉刺激失去兴趣。起初，他们会很感兴趣，因为婴儿通常对周围的世界很好奇，但过了一段时间，他们会失去兴趣，不再看它，这是因为他们已经完全编码了刺激的记忆，不再有任何新的信息需要学习。在首席研究员最近的一项研究中，与同龄的听力婴儿相比，失聪婴儿需要更长的时间来适应新的视觉刺激（一个彩色物体）。基于前面讨论的假设，对这些发现的主要解释是，聋哑婴儿将视觉信息编码到记忆中的速度较慢，因此习惯化较慢。然而，也有可能是失聪的婴儿习惯化较慢，因为他们实际上对物体编码了更强的记忆，或者对视觉刺激表现出更深的持续注意力。这些替代可能性也会导致更长的查找时间。因此，我们不能仅从行为测量来推断导致失聪和听力正常婴儿之间观察到的差异的潜在大脑过程。换句话说，失聪婴儿视觉处理差异的根本原因可能不会反映在可观察到的婴儿行为中，这使得他们非常适合神经成像方法。这项研究将使用脑电描记术（EEG）来测量视觉习惯化过程中的大脑活动，以便在这些相互竞争的假设之间进行仲裁，以解释为什么我们观察到聋哑婴儿和听力婴儿在视觉处理方面存在差异。该研究项目还将检查婴儿大脑发育的测量是否与他们一年后的语言发育有关。这些信息对于帮助家庭和临床医生了解听力损失婴儿和听力正常婴儿的发育轨迹至关重要。该项目的研究结果将通过社区研讨会与家庭分享，并将通过同行评审的出版物和会议上的演讲与学术界和医学界分享。