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G0C9521N#56128940

Abstract:

The survival rate of very preterm infants (gestational age < 32 weeks) has steadily increased over the years. Unfortunately, this is not without long-term neurodevelopmental impact, such as a higher prevalence of socio-emotional and cognitive difficulties. Here, we monitor a well-phenotyped cohort of prematurely born children and their parents, from their early days as newborns at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). At five years of age, we administered a series of frequency-tagging EEG paradigms to investigate the neural sensitivity to crucial social cues, i.e. sensitivity for faces and voices. Frequency-tagging EEG is based on the principle that brain activity will synchronize with the frequency of periodic stimulation, thereby allowing to selectively tag different streams and categories of sensory stimulation. We applied two multi-input frequency-tagging EEG paradigms with streams of social and non-social stimuli presented simultaneously but each tagged at different presentation rates. In the visual domain, we presented streams of faces and houses. In the auditory domain, we presented streams of voices and object sounds. Preliminary results comparing preterm (N = 40) versus full-term (N = 18) preschoolers showed reduced social tuning in the auditory but not in the visual domain. The diminished tuning towards voices in the preterm population can be interpreted against the background of atypical auditory and premature visual stimulation in the NICU environment. This research can contribute to understanding the socio-emotional and communicative development of preterm children and may help identifying those children at risk of psychopathology or subclinical socio-emotional difficulties.