Investigating event-related oscillations in infancy

Two general approaches have been taken to the electrophysiological study of infant brain function: event-related and evoked potentials (see Chapters 2–8 of this volume) and resting EEG (see Chapters 8 and 9). In this chapter, we introduce a third (intermediate) approach that we term “event-related oscillations”. Briefly, event-related oscillations (EROs) are bursts of EEG at particular frequencies that are approximately time-locked to task or stimulus presentation events. For this reason, they are taken to reflect oscillatory activity in the brain related to specific task-relevant computations. While there is a growing literature on EROs in adults, particularly with respect to highfrequency (gamma-band) bursts, the approach has only just begun to be applied to infants. In the first section of this chapter we initially describe (1) how EROs can be analyzed from raw EEG data, (2) the potential pitfalls and sources of artefact with EROs, and (3) issues of experimental design. Following this, we review evidence from two areas where we have adopted the ERO approach to study infants’ perception and processing of objects. Finally, we discuss potential future avenues for research on infant cognition with EROs.

[1]  M. Arterberry,et al.  Infant Visual Perception , 2007 .

[2]  Mark H Johnson,et al.  Oscillatory activity in the infant brain reflects object maintenance. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[3]  M. Kavšek.  The Influence of Context on Amodal Completion in 5- and 7-Month-Old Infants , 2004 .

[4]  Mark H Johnson,et al.  Representing occluded objects in the human infant brain , 2003, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[5]  R. Baillargeon,et al.  Developments in young infants' reasoning about occluded objects , 2002, Cognitive Psychology.

[6]  David Rudrauf,et al.  Estimating the time-course of coherence between single-trial brain signals: an introduction to wavelet coherence , 2002, Neurophysiologie Clinique/Clinical Neurophysiology.

[7]  M. Kavšek.  The perception of static subjective contours in infancy. , 2002, Child development.

[8]  Gergely Csibra,et al.  Illusory contour figures are perceived as occluding surfaces by 8‐month‐old infants , 2001 .

[9]  N. Logothetis,et al.  Neurophysiological investigation of the basis of the fMRI signal , 2001, Nature.

[10]  Y. Munakata.  Graded representations in behavioral dissociations , 2001, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[11]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Differential Frontal Cortex Activation Before Anticipatory and Reactive Saccades in Infants , 2001 .

[12]  C S Herrmann,et al.  Magnetoencephalographic responses to illusory figures: early evoked gamma is affected by processing of stimulus features. , 2000, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[13]  Michael W. Spratling,et al.  Gamma oscillations and object processing in the infant brain. , 2000, Science.

[14]  E. Miller,et al.  Effects of Visual Experience on the Representation of Objects in the Prefrontal Cortex , 2000, Neuron.

[15]  H. Müller,et al.  Evidence for 40-Hz oscillatory short-term visual memory revealed by human reaction-time measurements. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[16]  C. Herrmann,et al.  Gamma responses and ERPs in a visual classification task , 1999, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[17]  O. Bertrand,et al.  Oscillatory gamma activity in humans and its role in object representation , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[18]  V. Samar,et al.  Wavelet Analysis of Neuroelectric Waveforms: A Conceptual Tutorial , 1999, Brain and Language.

[19]  G. Csibra,et al.  Neural correlates of saccade planning in infants: a high-density ERP study. , 1998, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[20]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Visual attention in infants with perinatal brain damage: Evidence of the importance of anterior lesions , 1998 .

[21]  M S Graziano,et al.  Coding the locations of objects in the dark. , 1997, Science.

[22]  Matthias M. Müller,et al.  Visually induced gamma-band responses in human electroencephalographic activity — a link to animal studies , 1996, Experimental Brain Research.

[23]  J. Pernier,et al.  Stimulus Specificity of Phase-Locked and Non-Phase-Locked 40 Hz Visual Responses in Human , 1996, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[24]  Renee L Baillargeon,et al.  Physical reasoning in young infants: Seeking explanations for impossible events , 1994 .

[25]  H. Ghim,et al.  Evidence for perceptual organization in infants: Perception of subjective contours by young infants , 1990 .

[26]  R. Llinás.  The intrinsic electrophysiological properties of mammalian neurons: insights into central nervous system function. , 1988, Science.

[27]  E. Spelke,et al.  Object perception and object-directed reaching in infancy. , 1985, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[28]  A. Treisman,et al.  Illusory conjunctions in the perception of objects , 1982, Cognitive Psychology.

[29]  B. Bertenthal,et al.  Development of visual organization: the perception of subjective contours. , 1980, Child development.

[30]  J. Piaget.  The construction of reality in the child , 1954 .

[31]  Jay Belsky,et al.  Neural correlates of the perception of goal-directed action in infants. , 2007, Acta psychologica.

[32]  R. Baillargeon.  Infants physical knowledge: Of acquired expectations and core principles , 2001 .

[33]  B. Scholl,et al.  Explaining the infant''s object concept: Beyond the perception/cognition dichotomy , 1999 .

[34]  F. Varela,et al.  Measuring phase synchrony in brain signals , 1999, Human brain mapping.

[35]  J. Pernier,et al.  Induced gamma-band activity during the delay of a visual short-term memory task in humans. , 1998, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[36]  W Singer,et al.  Visual feature integration and the temporal correlation hypothesis. , 1995, Annual review of neuroscience.

[37]  G. Kanizsa.  Subjective contours. , 1976, Scientific American.