Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

Music and the brain: a review of neuroscientific and clinical applications

My research examines the relationship between neuroscience and music, exploring its clinical applications. I extensively review the specific neuroanatomic structures implicated in musical perception. Knowing the function of each brain structure as it relates to musical perception provides insight as to how music is able to elicit certain physical and emotional responses. As music interacts with the human brain, it is also able to provide social, cognitive, and emotional benefits. Given these benefits, my research argues that music is an effective therapeutic intervention for vulnerable populations. I examine the impact of music therapy on preterm infants, hearing impaired individuals, intellectually disabled individuals, and Parkinson\u27s and Alzheimer’s Disease patients. My research also proposes that continuous musical exposure throughout the lifespan may prevent the acquisition of neurodegenerative disorders later in life. As the literature generally appears to support this proposition, I ultimately urge for an increased emphasis on music-based education programs

Using auditory evoked brain responses to detect anxious vulnerabilities in neonates.

Anxiety disorders are prevalent in both adult and child populations, and are associated with significant economic and psychosocial costs. There are clearly familial patterns of transmission within the anxiety disorders, and the inherited risk is likely a non-specific vulnerability toward negative affect, with a biological-environmental interaction leading to specific manifestations within the anxiety disorders. Among the vulnerabilities toward anxiety may be information processing biases that predispose individuals to be more vigilant to novelty, processes that may be specifically associated with the right cerebral hemisphere. The current study utilized auditory event related potentials (ERPs) to explore the degree to which such processes may be related to risk toward anxiety disorders in a neonatal population (n=30). Findings supported the growing evidence that predispositions toward anxious patterns of responding are associated with greater activation of the right cerebral hemisphere, as neonates of more highly anxious mothers displayed more positive right hemisphere responses overall. Further, consistent with theories that attentional biases toward novelty are associated with the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety, it was found that measures of both maternal state and trait anxiety were significant predictors of the neonate\u27s brain response to a stranger\u27s voice. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for further understanding the developmental pathways associated pathological anxiety

Prenatal exposure to maternal anxiety affects neurocognition in the first year of life

status: publishe

Reduced neural sensitivity to social stimuli in infants at risk for autism

In the hope of discovering early markers of autism, attention has recently turned to the study of infants at risk owing to being the younger siblings of children with autism. Because the condition is highly heritable, later-born siblings of diagnosed children are at substantially higher risk for developing autism or the broader autism phenotype than the general population. Currently, there are no strong predictors of autism in early infancy and diagnosis is not reliable until around 3 years of age. Because indicators of brain functioning may be sensitive predictors, and atypical social interactions are characteristic of the syndrome, we examined whether temporal lobe specialization for processing visual and auditory social stimuli during infancy differs in infants at risk. In a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study, infants aged 4–6 months at risk for autism showed less selective neural responses to social stimuli (auditory and visual) than low-risk controls. These group differences could not be attributed to overall levels of attention, developmental stage or chronological age. Our results provide the first demonstration of specific differences in localizable brain function within the first 6 months of life in a group of infants at risk for autism. Further, these differences closely resemble known patterns of neural atypicality in children and adults with autism. Future work will determine whether these differences in infant neural responses to social stimuli predict either later autism or the broader autism phenotype frequently seen in unaffected family members