2026/01/20 by Isobel Greenhalgh, Borja Blanco, Chiara Bulgarelli +10 · 1 voice
Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Voice and Speech Disorders
paper · doi:10.1117/1.nph.13.s1.s13007
openalex publication_date 2026/01/20 · openalex created_date 2026/01/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Significance: Neonates undergo rapid development, yet the examination of emerging brain markers across paradigms, cognitive domains, and diverse global populations remains limited. Aim: We investigated whether brain responses at 1 month of age could be interrogated across paradigms to offer deeper context-specific insights into neurodevelopment. Approach: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to assess frontal and temporal brain responses during natural sleep in 181 infants from a low-income setting (rural Gambia) and 58 infants from a higher-income setting (Cambridge, United Kingdom) during three auditory paradigms: social selectivity, habituation and novelty detection, and functional connectivity. Paradigm-level brain responses were analyzed using threshold-free cluster enhancement and cross-paradigm comparisons of individual responses. Results: Both Gambian and UK infants showed habituation but not novelty responses, higher inter- versus intra-hemispheric connectivity, stronger inter-hemispheric connectivity in temporal relative to frontal regions, stronger inter-regional connectivity between right temporal and left frontal regions, and nonvocal > vocal selectivity (UK infants only). Conclusions: Cross-cohort differences in the cross-paradigm analyses suggest that context-specific developmental markers are evident within the first month of life and show high individual variability. Cross-paradigm analyses revealed that greater vocal selectivity (UK) is associated with higher inter-hemispheric connectivity, potentially allowing us to identify biomarkers of more mature neurodevelopment within the first weeks of postnatal life.