De prenatale oorsprong van ‘welvaartsziekten’ en gedragsproblemen

status: publishe

Separating acoustic deviance from novelty during the first year of life:A review of event-related potential evidence

Orienting to salient events in the environment is a first step in the development of attention in young infants. Electrophysiological studies have indicated that in newborns and young infants, sounds with widely distributed spectral energy, such as noise and various environmental sounds, as well as sounds widely deviating from their context elicit an event-related potential (ERP) similar to the adult P3a response. We discuss how the maturation of event-related potentials parallels the process of the development of passive auditory attention during the first year of life. Behavioral studies have indicated that the neonatal orientation to high-energy stimuli gradually changes to attending to genuine novelty and other significant events by approximately 9 months of age. In accordance with these changes, in newborns, the ERP response to large acoustic deviance is dramatically larger than that to small and moderate deviations. This ERP difference, however, rapidly decreases within first months of life and the differentiation of the ERP response to genuine novelty from that to spectrally rich but repeatedly presented sounds commences during the same period. The relative decrease of the response amplitudes elicited by high-energy stimuli may reflect development of an inhibitory brain network suppressing the processing of uninformative stimuli. Based on data obtained from healthy full-term and pre-term infants as well as from infants at risk for various developmental problems, we suggest that the electrophysiological indices of the processing of acoustic and contextual deviance may be indicative of the functioning of auditory attention, a crucial prerequisite of learning and language development

Developmental brain alterations in 17 year old boys are related to antenatal maternal anxiety

OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between maternal anxiety during pregnancy and the brain activity of 17 year old adolescents performing two cognitive control tasks. METHODS: Twenty-three 17 year old boys of mothers whose level of anxiety was measured during pregnancy were investigated using ERP while performing a Go/Nogo paradigm assessing exogenous cognitive control and a Gambling paradigm requiring endogenous cognitive control. RESULTS: No effects of antenatal maternal anxiety were observed in the Go/Nogo paradigm. However, in the Gambling paradigm adolescents of the high anxiety group (n=8) showed a less efficient pattern of decision making compared to the adolescents in the low-average anxiety group (n=15). Moreover, only for this task the ERP data showed an enlarged early frontal P2a component in the high anxiety group. CONCLUSIONS: The brain activity of adolescents during an endogenous cognitive control task is associated to the level of anxiety experienced by their mother during pregnancy. This association was not observed during an exogenous cognitive control task. SIGNIFICANCE: This study indicates that a child's brain functionality is related to its mother's anxiety during pregnancy. Endogenous cognitive control is regarded the cognitive function most affected by the level of antenatal maternal anxiety