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Reward-related processing of familiar maternal speech in six-month-old infants with different likelihoods of ASD
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Poster A63 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Eiichi Hoshiino1, Masahiro Hata1, Mingdi Xu1, Eriko Yamamoto2, Yasuyo Minagawa3; 1Keio University Global Research Institute, 2Sagami Women's University, 3Keio University Faculty of Letters
Caregivers’ voices, mostly mothers’, are known to have positive effects on the language and social development of infants. Moreover, the mother’s speech critically affects the neonatal brain network (Uchida et al., 2020). However, voice responses may vary between infants with elevated likelihood (EL infants) and typically likelihood (TL infants) of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The brain activity of EL infants exhibits a unique response to human voices (Xiao, 2022; Lloyd-Fox, 2013). Children with ASD demonstrate weaker connectivity between voice processing and reward-related areas (Abrams, 2013). However, how brain processing, including functional connectivity of EL infants to familiar voices, such as the mother’s voice, differs from that of TL infants remains unknown. We examined the differences in brain activity and functional connectivity when EL infants and TL listened to their mothers and female strangers speak. Twenty 6-month-old EL infants (with siblings diagnosed with ASD) and 26 age-matched TL infants (without siblings diagnosed with ASD) were included. We measured frontal and temporal cerebral activity in response to speech using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We used speech stimuli from the infant’s mother or a stranger in an infant-directed manner presented to the infants for 15 s per block. Brain activity was assessed using permutation tests on the average block of changes in the oxyhemoglobin concentration. Functional connectivity was analyzed using phase-locking values. Furthermore, we examined the correlations between these brain responses and other behavioral data (video recordings of the still-face paradigm and developmental testing) and questionnaires (e.g., CDI) from our longitudinal study. TL infants showed significant activation in several areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus (STG), and right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) when listening to their mothers’ voices. Conversely, EL infants exhibited decreased activation in the left STG and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). TL infants showed significantly higher activation in these areas than EL infants when listening to their mothers’ voices. This suggests a difference in voice processing between the TL and EL groups, which may be related to their differential attachments and language development. TL infants exhibited significant functional connectivity between the right STG, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and left ventrofrontal area, including the OFC and the frontal pole, exclusively for the mother’s condition. EL infants did not show such connectivity under either condition. Significant functional connectivity was found between the left STG and left IFG only in the mother’s condition. Some of these connections were positively related to subsequent socio-language development. These results suggest that TL infants identify their mother’s voice and process it as a reward, as reflected by the strong functional connectivity between the STG and OFC. The maternal voice serving as a reward may facilitate language development in TL infants. In contrast, weak response to familiar voices observed in infants with EL at six months may reflect their lower interest or attention to human voices, regardless of the speaker. This may partially explain the slower language and social development in EL infants.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Language Development/Acquisition