Kathryn Altman, Winner of the 2024 NIMH Three-Minute Talks Competition

Transcript

Kathryn Altman: Hello, my name is Kathryn Altman. When you look at a five-month-old baby, what do you see? At first glance, they don't appear to do all that much. However, beneath the surface, baby's brains are rapidly developing across a wide variety of domains, including that of communication. Communication, here is an umbrella term referring to both verbal and nonverbal ways of interacting with other people, understanding what drives babies' communicative development is a key area of interest for pediatric psychologists. I've had the opportunity to conduct a project investigating the neural response to novelty as a potential predictor for communication development. Now, these two things, the neural novelty response and communication development may seem completely unrelated. However, there is some research suggesting that babies with more highly reactive brains to novelty score higher on vocabulary development at two years old. But no research has investigated the neural novelty response as a potential predictor for broad communication development until now.

In the present study, we invited babies into the lab at five months old and had them wear EEG caps seen here, which measured their brain's electrical activity as the babies listened to a three-stimulus auditory oddball paradigm. This paradigm consisted of three types of sounds, standard beeping noises, deviant beeping noises with a different volume or pitch, and novel complex sounds like a cow mooing. We then used the brain activity recorded in response to each type of sound to calculate mismatch response MMR, and P3 variables in order to quantify the brain's response to deviant and novel stimuli respectively. We then followed up with families at two years old and had parents complete the infant toddler checklist or ITC. The ITC is a parent report questionnaire that assesses children's communication skills across three sub-domains; speech, symbolic, and social communication. We then analyzed the relations between the MMR and P3 scores and children's outcome scores on all three subscales of the ITC.

Interestingly, both the MMR and P3 responses were significantly correlated with social communication scores, such that babies whose brains were more highly reactive to novel stimuli scored higher on social communication abilities at two years old. This is the first piece of research implicating the neural novelty response as a potential predictor for social communication development. And this has really interesting clinical implications. If we can use the neural novelty response as a potential biomarker of children's social communication, developmental trajectories, perhaps we can use it as a way to identify which children are an elevated likelihood of showing social communication deficits or delays. This would help clinicians to more easily target those children for whom early intervention services would be helpful. In this way, we hope to use the research presented here today to help all children develop the ability to do what we as people and researchers love, to communicate. Thank you.