Abstract In recognition of the fact that most psychiatric conditions have neurodevelopmental origins, there is an increasing interest in applying the methodological and conceptual approaches from computational psychiatry to developmental cohorts. However, the challenge of acquiring and modelling behavioural responses in very young infants has thus far proven difficult to overcome. To address this we developed a novel gaze-contingent, cued-reversal paradigm that allowed 6-10 month old infants to make overt behavioural responses to assess learning of expectations and updating of behaviour in response to change. We then fit computational models to infant behaviour and, for the first time, were able to validate the winning model to the same standards as would be expected of adults (e.g. good parameter recoverability, model identifiability and simulated behavioural responses). Similar to prior findings in adults, model-based prediction error measures correlated with post-switch increases in pupil size; consistent with noradrenaline’s hypothesised role in learning about change. Data-driven clustering based on model parameters revealed two infant behavioural subtypes hidden within the data; one with a perseverating profile and the other with a more exploratory decision-making pattern. This approach sheds new light on the ‘classic’ finding that all infants under 12 months tend to perseverate. Crucially, there were no significant differences in age between the clusters, but differences in terms of adaptive skills and temperament measured via gold-standard developmental assessments. These results prime the field for infant computational psychiatry, demonstrating that we can reliably fit models to infant data and that the parameters from such models can identify subgroups with distinct cognitive profiles that are superior to those derived from the behavioural data alone.

Sensory deprivation can lead to cross-modal cortical changes, whereby sensory brain regions deprived of input may be recruited to perform atypical function. Enhanced cross-modal responses to visual stimuli observed in auditory cortex of postlingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users are hypothesized to reflect increased activation of cortical language regions, but it is unclear if this cross-modal activity is "adaptive" or "mal-adaptive" for speech understanding. To determine if increased activation of language regions is correlated with better speech understanding in CI users, we assessed task-related activation and functional connectivity of auditory and visual cortices to auditory and visual speech and non-speech stimuli in CI users (n = 14) and normal-hearing listeners (n = 17) and used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure hemodynamic responses. We used visually presented speech and non-speech to investigate neural processes related to linguistic content and observed that CI users show beneficial cross-modal effects. Specifically, an increase in connectivity between the left auditory and visual cortices-presumed primary sites of cortical language processing-was positively correlated with CI users' abilities to understand speech in background noise. Cross-modal activity in auditory cortex of postlingually deaf CI users may reflect adaptive activity of a distributed, multimodal speech network, recruited to enhance speech understanding.

We present a remote-control, smartphone-based scanning system that can achieve a full-head 3D scan of an infant within 2 seconds. The scanned images can then be automatically aligned to generate a 3D head surface model.

Significance: To effectively apply functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)/ diffuse optical tomography (DOT) devices, a three-dimensional (3D) model of the position of each optode on a subject ' s scalp and the positions of that subject ' s cranial landmarks are critical. Obtaining this information accurately in infants, who rarely stop moving, is an ongoing challenge. Aim: We propose a smartphone-based registration system that can potentially achieve a full-head 3D scan of a 6-month-old infant instantly. Approach: The proposed system is remotely controlled by a custom-designed Bluetooth controller. The scanned images can either be manually or automatically aligned to generate a 3D head surface model. Results: A full-head 3D scan of a 6-month-old infant can be achieved within 2 s via this system. In testing on a realistic but static infant head model, the average Euclidean error of optode position using this device was 1.8 mm. Conclusions: This low-cost 3D registration system therefore has the potential to permit accurate and near-instant fNIRS/DOT spatial registration.

Open AccessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Scott Sophie K., Cai Ceci Qing and Billing Addison 2023Correction to: 'Robert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion' (2022) by Scott et al.Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3782022040920220409http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0409SectionOpen AccessCorrectionCorrection to: 'Robert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion' (2022) by Scott et al. Sophie K. Scott Sophie K. Scott Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author , Ceci Qing Cai Ceci Qing Cai Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author and Addison Billing Addison Billing Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Sophie K. Scott Sophie K. Scott Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed , Ceci Qing Cai Ceci Qing Cai Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed and Addison Billing Addison Billing Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Published:14 November 2022https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0409This article corrects the followingReview ArticleRobert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagionhttps://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0178 Sophie K. Scott, Ceci Qing Cai and Addison Billing volume 377issue 1863Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences21 September 2022 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377, 20210178. (Published 21 September 2022) (https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0178) One of the authors' names was spelt incorrectly as Addsion Billing instead of Addison Billing. This has now been corrected on the publisher's website. Previous Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetailsRelated articlesRobert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion21 September 2022Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences This Issue02 January 2023Volume 378Issue 1867Theme issue 'Understanding forest landscape restoration: reinforcing scientific foundations for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration' compiled and edited by Andrew R. Marshall, Lindsay F. Banin, Marion Pfeifer, Catherine E. Waite, Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, Susan Chomba and Robin L. Chazdon Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0409PubMed:36373931Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0962-8436Online ISSN:1471-2970History: Manuscript received26/09/2022Manuscript accepted26/09/2022Published online14/11/2022Published in print02/01/2023 License:© 2022 The Authors.Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Citations and impact Subjectscognition

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy and behavioural methods were used to examine the neural basis of the behavioural contagion and authenticity of laughter. We demonstrate that the processing of laughter sounds recruits networks previously shown to be related to empathy and auditory-motor mirror networks. Additionally, we found that the differences in the levels of activation in response to volitional and spontaneous laughter could predict an individual's perception of how contagious they found the laughter to be.

There is a well-established link between allergies and mental health. While both atopic and food allergies are associated with increased levels of depression and anxiety, it is unclear what the mechanism behind this relationship is. Several theories touch upon potential psychological mechanisms, but until now only general reductions in cognitive performance as a function of allergy have been reported. We employed a tablet-based high-resolution assessment of cognition that also recorded mental health, socio-economic status, and allergies in 533 children aged 7-9 years. We then employed mediation analyses to investigate the role of cognitive variables in the relation between allergy and mental health, Welch's t-tests to test for differences between children with and without allergies, and logistic regression to identify what variables predicted allergic state. In line with previous research, we found children with allergies reported higher levels of anxiety and depression. Furthermore, they showed a unique profile of higher processing speed, equal verbal short-term memory, and worse performance on tests of fluid reasoning, number sense, search organisation, and spatial short-term memory. We confirmed that these variables predicted allergic state using logistic regression. Finally, mediation analyses showed that cognition partially mediated the relationship between allergy and both anxiety and depression. Our results suggest that allergies bias children towards particular cognitive profiles, which in turn are risk factors for anxiety and depression. This supports the view that early intervention could reduce the number of allergic children that develops comorbid psychiatric conditions.

Studies of cortical function in the awake infant are extremely challenging to undertake with traditional neuroimaging approaches. Partly in response to this challenge, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has become increasingly common in developmental neuroscience, but has significant limitations including resolution, spatial specificity and ergonomics. In adults, high-density arrays of near-infrared sources and detectors have recently been shown to yield dramatic improvements in spatial resolution and specificity when compared to typical fNIRS approaches. However, most existing fNIRS devices only permit the acquisition of ~20–100 sparsely distributed fNIRS channels, and increasing the number of optodes presents significant mechanical challenges, particularly for infant applications. A new generation of wearable, modular, high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) technologies has recently emerged that overcomes many of the limitations of traditional, fibre-based and low-density fNIRS measurements. Driven by the development of this new technology, we have undertaken the first study of the infant brain using wearable HD-DOT. Using a well-established social stimulus paradigm, and combining this new imaging technology with advances in cap design and spatial registration, we show that it is now possible to obtain high-quality, functional images of the infant brain with minimal constraints on either the environment or on the infant participants. Our results are consistent with prior low-density fNIRS measures based on similar paradigms, but demonstrate superior spatial localization, improved depth specificity, higher SNR and a dramatic improvement in the consistency of the responses across participants. Our data retention rates also demonstrate that this new generation of wearable technology is well tolerated by the infant population.

The neonatal brain undergoes dramatic structural and functional changes over the last trimester of gestation. The accuracy of source localisation of brain activity recorded from the scalp therefore relies on accurate age-specific head models. Although an age-appropriate population-level atlas could be used, detail is lost in the construction of such atlases, in particular with regard to the smoothing of the cortical surface, and so such a model is not representative of anatomy at an individual level. In this work, we describe the construction of a database of individual structural priors of the neonatal head using 215 individual-level datasets at ages 29-44 weeks postmenstrual age from the Developing Human Connectome Project. We have validated a method to segment the extra-cerebral tissue against manual segmentation. We have also conducted a leave-one-out analysis to quantify the expected spatial error incurred with regard to localising functional activation when using a best-matching individual from the database in place of a subject-specific model; the median error was calculated to be 8.3 mm (median absolute deviation 3.8 mm). The database can be applied for any functional neuroimaging modality which requires structural data whereby the physical parameters associated with that modality vary with tissue type and is freely available at www.ucl.ac.uk/dot-hub.

The brains of male and female mice are shaped by genetics and hormones during development. The enzyme aromatase helps establish sex differences in social behaviors and in the neural circuits that produce these behaviors. The medial amygdala of mice contains a large population of aromatase neurons and is a critical hub in the social behavior network. Moreover, the neural representation of social stimuli in the medial amygdala displays clear sex differences that track developmental changes in social behaviors. Here, we identify a potential anatomic basis for those sex differences. We found that sensory input from the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB) to aromatase neurons is derived nearly exclusively from the anterior AOB, which selectively responds to chemosensory cues from conspecific animals. Through the coordinated use of mouse transgenics and viralbased circuit-tracing strategies, we demonstrate a clear sex difference in the volume of synapses connecting the accessory olfactory bulb to aromatase-expressing neurons in the medial amygdala of male versus female mice. This difference in anatomy likely mediates, at least in part, sex differences in medial amygdala-mediated social behaviors.