ERP Effects in Infant Brain

Infants social bonding is strongly supported by mother’s face and voice recognition. Though, other aspects of the external world play an important role in development. Prior studies suggested that odor, and more especially maternal odor, is a significant influence: it can produce a soothing effect on crying, reduce anxiety during medical procedures and impact perceptual and cognitive processing. However, little is known about the precise role of maternal odor in early development.

In the recent study “Maternal odor reduces the neural response to fearful faces in human infants” (2020), researchers investigated how infant brain responses and emotional expression may be impacted when exposed to maternal odor. The research was conducted by using electroencephalogram (EEG) on seven-month-old infants and comparing exposure to happy and scary faces. The chosen age of the objects of study was seven-months of age since during that stage of life infants are able to distinct emotional facial expressions. To analyze the impact of maternal odor, researchers used two controls:

* Control 1: exposure to either no specific odor or an odor different from the infant’s mother
* Control 2: exposure to their mother’s odor

The results showed that infants exposed to Control 1 expressed a fear response and the infants exposed to Control 2 did not, which suggested that maternal odor has a significant impact in infants’ social perception.

What I found most interesting about this study, is that researchers quantified the response to fear signals by measuring the amplitude of the Nc, an event-related potential (ERP) component. The Nc component of ERP is frequently studied during infancy because it is related to the attention control (Conte et al., 2020) and the amplitude is believed to increase in response to fearful faces (Jessen, 2020).

Likewise, Conte et al. also investigated infants’ ERP responses (in this case to faces and objects) in developing infants for their research study denominated “Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life” where their focus of study was mainly the amplitude variation and cortical localization, and the results suggested that the Nc component differs for faces and objects and is dependent on the attentional state.

Both of the mentioned studies highlight the importance of attention, perception and recognition and how ERPs responses are related to them. Sensory processing is critical for pathological diagnosis but may be even more important to detect certain mechanisms during infancy to prevent or improve cognitive disorders. At that point of life, brain is still developing, and events are not fully encoded; thus, much of the brain development depends on the stimuli exposure during early childhood. Since recording and analyzing ERPs seems to reveal wide information about the brain activity in infants, it is crucial to continue investigating their action mechanisms to design treatments that enhance mental engagement, sense development and stimulation.
 
References
 
Conte, S., Richards, J. E., Guy, M. W., Xie, W., & Roberts, J. E. (2020). Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life. NeuroImage, 211, 116602. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116602
Jessen S. (2020). Maternal odor reduces the neural response to fearful faces in human infants. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 45, 100858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2020.100858