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G0C9521N#56128940

Abstract:

The survival rate of preterm infants has steadily increased over the years. Unfortunately , this is not without long term neurodevelopmental impact. Very preterm birth (gestational age < 32 weeks; VPT) is often associated with a higher prevalence of atypical socio emotional and cognitive development. Yet, it is still an open question how these early life deficits in socio emotional and communicative development in VPT children may predict future psychopathology. He re, we monitor and follow up a well phenotyped cohort of prematurely born children and their parents, from their early days as newborns at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) until primary school. At five years of age, we administered frequency tagging EEG paradigms to investigate the neural sensitivity to social cues across both the visual and the auditory sensory modality , 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 categori es of sensory stimulation To assess neural tuning towards social stimuli, we applied tw o 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 simultaneously present ed 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 deficient neural tuning in the auditory but not in the visual domain. The reduced spontaneous 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 understand ing the socio emotional and communicative development of preterm children and may help identifying those children at risk of psychopathology or subclinical socio emotional difficulties.