Cortical route for facelike pattern processing in human newborns

Humans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that, in adults, is supported by a set of faces-pecific cortical patches. Human newborns, already shortly after birth, preferentially orient to faces, even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2019-03, Vol.116 (10), p.4625-4630
Main Authors: Buiatti, Marco, Di Giorgio, Elisa, Piazza, Manuela, Polloni, Carlo, Menna, Giuseppe, Taddei, Fabrizio, Baldo, Ermanno, Vallortigara, Giorgio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Attention
Biological Sciences
Birth
Brain - diagnostic imaging
Brain - physiology
Cortex
EEG
Electroencephalography
Face
Facial Recognition
Female
Humans
Infant, Newborn - psychology
Male
Neonates
Pattern recognition
Social Sciences
Specialization
Stimuli
Substrates
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Summary:Humans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that, in adults, is supported by a set of faces-pecific cortical patches. Human newborns, already shortly after birth, preferentially orient to faces, even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometrical patterns vs. perceptually equivalent nonfacelike stimuli. The neural substrates underlying this early preference are still largely unexplored. Is the adult face-specific cortical circuit already active at birth, or does its specialization develop slowly as a function of experience and/or maturation? We measured EEG responses in 1- to 4-day-old awake, attentive human newborns to schematic facelike patterns and nonfacelike control stimuli, visually presented with slow oscillatory “peekaboo” dynamics (0.8 Hz) in a frequency-tagging design. Despite the limited duration of newborns’ attention, reliable frequency-tagged responses could be estimated for each stimulus from the peak of the EEG power spectrum at the stimulation frequency. Upright facelike stimuli elicited a significantly stronger frequency-tagged response than inverted facelike controls in a large set of electrodes. Source reconstruction of the underlying cortical activity revealed the recruitment of a partially right-lateralized network comprising lateral occipitotemporal and medial parietal areas overlapping with the adult face-processing circuit. This result suggests that the cortical route specialized in face processing is already functional at birth.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1812419116