Rianne Haartsen

Birkbeck, University of London · Department of Psychological Sciences

Atypical face processing is commonly reported in autism. Its neural correlates have been explored extensively across single neuroimaging modalities within key regions of the face processing network, such as the fusiform gyrus (FFG). Nonetheless, it is poorly understood how variation in brain anatomy and function jointly impacts face processing and...

Looking at caregivers’ faces is important for early social development, and there is a concomitant increase in neural correlates of attention to familiar versus novel faces in the first 6 months. However, by 12 months of age brain responses may not differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces. Traditional group‐based analyses do not examine...

Infants' motivation to engage with the social world depends on the interplay between individual brain's characteristics and previous exposure to social cues such as the parent's smile or eye contact. Different hypotheses about why specific combinations of emotional expressions and gaze direction engage children have been tested with group-level app...

Measures of early neuro‐cognitive development that are suitable for use in low‐resource settings are needed to enable studies of the effects of early adversity on the developing brain in a global context. These measures should have high acquisition rates and good face and construct validity. Here, we investigated the feasibility of a naturalistic e...

Differences in face processing are commonly reported in case/control studies of autism. Their neural correlates have been explored extensively across single neuroimaging modalities within key regions of the face processing network, such as the fusiform gyrus (FFG). Nonetheless, it is poorly understood how different variation(s) in brain anatomy and...

Almaatouq et al. propose an integrative experiment design space combined with large samples for scientific advancement. We argue recent innovative designs combining closed-loop experiment designs and Bayesian optimisation allow for integrative experiments at an individual level during a single session, circumventing the necessity for large samples....

Background Differences in face processing are commonly reported in case/control studies of autism. Their neural correlates have been explored extensively across single neuroimaging modalities within key regions of the face processing network, such as the fusiform gyrus (FFG). Nonetheless, it is poorly understood how different variation(s) in brain...

Autism is defined as a neurodevelopmental condition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and may be related to variation in excitatory (Glutamatergic) and inhibitory (GABAergic) balance (Ahmad et al., 2022), leaning towards hyperexcitability (Casanova et al., 2003; Gibson et al., 2008; Manyukhina et al., 2022) and more neural background noise w...

Background: Measurement of social and cognitive brain development using electroencephalography (EEG) offers the potential for early identification of children with elevated risk of developmental delay. However, there have been no published reports of how acceptable EEG technology is to parents and children within communities, especially in low-reso...

Infant-directed speech and direct gaze are important social cues that shape infant’s attention to their parents. Traditional methods for probing their effect on infant attention involve a small number of pre-selected screen-based stimuli, which do not capture the complexity of real-world interactions. Here, we used neuroadaptive Bayesian Optimizati...

Theta oscillations (spectral power and connectivity) are sensitive to the social content of an experience in typically developing infants, providing a possible marker of early social brain development. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting early social behaviour, but links to underlying social brain function remain unclear. We explored...

Background: Autism is proposed to be characterised by an atypical balance of cortical excitation and inhibition (E/I). However, most studies have examined E/I alterations in older autistic individuals, meaning that findings could in part reflect homeostatic compensation. To assess the directionality of effects, it is necessary to examine alteratio...

Background Behavioral studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have problems coordinating their own motor actions (meta-analysis: Fournier et al., 2010). There is also evidence that delays and atypical patterns of development emerge early in the onset of ASD (Iverson et al., 2019). One hypothesis is that motor impairm...

Sleep problems in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) emerge early in development, yet the origin remains unclear. Here, we characterise developmental trajectories in sleep onset latency (SOL) and night awakenings in infants at elevated likelihood (EL) for ASD (who have an older sibling with ASD) and infants at typical likelihood (TL) for ASD. Further,...

Background Studying the neural processing of faces can illuminate the mechanisms of compromised social expertise in autism. To resolve a longstanding debate, we examined whether differences in configural face processing in autism are underpinned by quantitative differences in the activation of typical face processing pathways, or the recruitment of...

Background: Biomarkers from electroencephalographic (EEG) measures may help identify young autistic people. EEG methods have great potential for use in field and clinical settings due to their scalability, relatively low costs, and portability. Combined EEG and eye-tracking (ET) may furthermore help improve data quality. EEG recordings while watchi...

The field of infant research is not immune from the reproducibility crisis in cognitive science and psychology. In their recent methodological article, Byers‐Heinlein et al. (2021) invited infant researchers to commit to produce robust findings by reporting reliability metrics for their variables of interest, improving data quality and quantity, an...

Background : Measurement of social and cognitive brain development using electroencephalography (EEG) offers the potential for early identification of children with elevated risk of developmental delay. However, there have been no published reports of how acceptable EEG technology is to parents and children within communities, especially in low-res...

Electroencephalography (EEG) has substantial potential value for examining individual differences during early development. Current challenges in developmental EEG research include high dropout rates and low trial numbers, which may in part be due to passive stimulus presentation. Comparability is challenged by idiosyncratic processing pipelines. W...

A core goal of functional neuroimaging is to study how the environment is processed in the brain. The mainstream paradigm involves concurrently measuring a broad spectrum of brain responses to a small set of environmental features preselected with reference to previous studies or a theoretical framework. As a complement, we invert this approach by...

Background Early identification of preschool children who are at risk of faltering in their development is essential to ensuring that all children attain their full potential. Electroencephalography (EEG) has been used to measure neural correlates of cognitive and social development in children for decades. Effective portable and low-cost EEG devic...

Atypicalities in connectivity between brain regions have been implicated in a range of neurocognitive disorders. We require metrics to assess stable individual differences in connectivity in the developing brain, while facing the challenge of limited data quality and quantity. Here, we examine how varying core processing parameters can optimise the...

Introduction Functional Electroencephalography (EEG) networks in infants have been proposed as useful biomarkers for developmental brain disorders. However, the reliability of these networks and their characteristics has not been established. We evaluated the reliability of these networks and their characteristics in 10‐month‐old infants. Methods...

We conducted a replication study of our prior report that increased alpha EEG connectivity at 14-months associates with later autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis, and dimensional variation in restricted interests/repetitive behaviours. 143 infants at high and low familial risk for ASD watched dynamic videos of spinning toys and women singing n...

Cognitive control processes involved in human multitasking arise, mature, and decline across age. This study investigated how age modulates cognitive control at two different levels: the level of task intentions and the level of the implementation of intentions into the corresponding actions. We were particularly interested in specifying maturation...

Recent studies of the structural and functional development of the human brain over the early years have highlighted the rapid development of brain structures and their interconnectivity. Some regional functional specializations emerge within the first months after birth, while others have a more protracted course of development spanning over the f...

From early in life, young children eagerly engage in social interactions. Yet, they still have difficulties in performing well-coordinated joint actions with others. Adult literature suggests that two processes are important for smooth joint action coordination: action prediction and inhibitory control. The aim of the current study was to disentang...