Teodora Gliga

University of East Anglia | UEA · School of Psychology

Investigating learning mechanisms in infancy relies largely on behavioural measures like visual attention, which often fail to predict whether stimuli would be encoded successfully. This study explored EEG activity in the theta frequency band, previously shown to predict successful learning in adults, to directly study infants' cognitive engagement...

In addition to core symptoms, i.e., social interaction and communication difficulties and restricted and repetitive behaviors, autism is also characterized by aspects of superior perception [1]. One well-replicated finding is that of superior performance in visual search tasks, in which participants have to indicate the presence of an odd-one-out e...

Significance This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans’ preference for native speakers. Infants’ preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of our adult tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one’s own...

Although it is widely recognized that human infants build a sizeable conceptual repertoire before mastering language, it remains a matter of debate whether and to what extent early conceptual and category knowledge contributes to language development. We addressed this question by investigating whether 12-month-olds used preverbal categories to dis...

Sensory regulation, the ability to select and process sensory information to plan and perform appropriate behaviours, provides a foundation for learning. From early in development, infants manifest differences in the strategies used for sensory regulation. Here, we discuss the nature and characteristics of sensory seeking, a key behavioural strateg...

Cognitive markers may in theory be more sensitive to the effects of intervention than overt behavioral measures. The current study tests the impact of the Intervention with the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings—Video Interaction for Promoting Positive Parenting (iBASIS‐VIPP) on an eye‐tracking measure of social attention: dwell time to the re...

Recognising objects is a vital skill on which humans heavily rely to respond quickly and adaptively to their environment. Yet, we lack a full understanding of the role visual information sampling plays in this process, and its relation to the individual’s priors. To bridge this gap, the eye-movements of 18 adult participants were recorded during a...

Recognizing objects is a vital skill on which humans heavily rely to respond quickly and adaptively to their environment. Yet, we lack understanding on the role that visual information sampling plays in this process, and its relation to the individual's priors. To bridge this gap, the eye-movements of 18 adult participants were recorded during a fr...

Background How often a child naps, during infancy, is believed to reflect both intrinsic factors, that is, the need of an immature brain to consolidate information soon after it is acquired, and environmental factors. Difficulty accounting for important environmental factors that interfere with a child's sleep needs (e.g., attending daycare) has cl...

A diagnosis of autism typically depends on clinical assessments by highly trained professionals. This high resource demand poses a challenge in low-resource settings. Digital assessment of neurodevelopmental symptoms by non-specialists provides a potential avenue to address this challenge. This cross-sectional case-control field study establishes p...

Alterations in the development of attention control and learning have been associated with autism and can be measured using the ‘antisaccade task’, which assesses a child’s ability to make an oculomotor response away from a distracting stimulus, and learn to instead anticipate a later reward. We aimed to assess these cognitive processes using porta...

Sensory regulation, the ability to select and process sensory information to plan and perform appropriate behaviours, provides a foundation for learning. From early in development, infants manifest differences in the strategies used for sensory regulation. Here, we discuss the nature and characteristics of sensory seeking, a key behavioural strateg...

Dimensional approaches to psychopathology interrogate the core neurocognitive domains interacting at the individual level to shape diagnostic symptoms. Embedding this approach in prospective longitudinal studies could transform our understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders. Such designs require us to move beyond tradit...

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,...

Caregiver touch is crucial for infants' healthy development, but its role in shaping infant cognition has been relatively understudied. In particular, despite strong premises to hypothesize its function in directing infant attention to social information, little empirical evidence exists on the topic. In this study, we investigated the associations...

Children typically prefer to attend to social stimuli (e.g. faces, smiles) over non-social stimuli (e.g. natural scene, household objects). This preference for social stimuli is believed to be an essential building block for later social skills and healthy social development. Preference for social stimuli are typically measured using either passive...

Slower habituation to repeating stimuli characterises Autism, but it is not known whether this is driven by difficulties with information processing or an attentional bias towards sameness. We conducted eye-tracking and presented looming geometrical shapes, clocks with moving arms and smiling faces, as two separate streams of stimuli (one repeating...

Evidence from multiple empirical studies suggests children’s Executive Functions are depleted immediately after viewing some types of TV content but not others. Correlational evidence suggests any such effects may be most problematic during the pre-school years. To establish whether “screen-time” is developmentally appropriate at this age we believ...

Early executive functions (EFs) lay the foundations for academic and social outcomes. In this parent‐report study of 575 UK‐based 8‐ to 36 month olds (218 followed longitudinally), we investigate how variation in the home environment before and during the 2020 pandemic relates to infants’ emerging EFs. Parent‐infant enriching activities were positi...

Background Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is heritable, the mechanisms through which genes contribute to symptom emergence remain unclear. Investigating candidate intermediate phenotypes such as the pupillary light reflex (PLR) prospectively from early in development could bridge genotype and behavioural phenotype. Methods Using eye track...

Internalising problems are common within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); early intervention to support those with emerging signs may be warranted. One promising signal lies in how individual differences in temperament are shaped by parenting. Our longitudinal study of infants with and without an older sibling with ASD investigated how parenting ass...

Previous research has provided rich evidence that a set of visual objects can be encoded in isolation along with their exact coordinate positions as well as a global configuration that provides a network of interrelated spatial information. However, much less data is available on how unoccupied locations are encoded and maintained in memory. We tes...

Autism Spectrum Disorders, hereafter referred to as autism, emerge early and persist throughout life, contributing significantly to global years lived with disability. Typically, an autism diagnosis depends on clinical assessments by highly trained professionals. This high resource demand poses a challenge in resource-limited areas where skilled pe...

High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages...

It was suggested that children’s referent selection may not lay memory traces sufficiently strong to lead to retention of new word-object mappings. If this was the case we expect children's incorrect selections to be easily rectified through feed-back. Previous work suggested that this was indeed the case in toddlers at typical likelihood (TL) but...

To what extent does language shape how we think about the world? Studies suggest that linguistic symbols expressing conceptual categories ("apple", "squirrel") make us focus on categorical information (e.g., that you saw a squirrel) and disregard individual information (e.g., whether that squirrel had a long or short tail). Across two experiments w...

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical knowledge linked to familiar kind concepts to disambiguate new words (e.g., “find the toma”): they exclude members of familiar kinds falling under familiar kind labels (e.g....

High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefits cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages...

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...

Naturally occurring high levels of caregiver touch promote offspring development in many animal species. Yet, caregiver touch remains a relatively understudied topic in human development, possibly due to challenges of measuring this means of interaction. While parental reports (e.g., questionnaires, diaries) are easy to collect, they may be subject...

A discrepancy between what was predicted and what is observed has been linked to increased looking times, changes in brain electrical activity, and increased pupil dilation in infants. These processes associated with heightened attention and readiness to learn might enhance the encoding and memory consolidation of the surprising object, as suggeste...

Backgrounds Atypicalities in tactile processing are reported in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but it remains unknown if they precede and associate with the traits of these disorders emerging in childhood. We investigated behavioural and neural markers of tactile sensory processing in infants at e...

Background: Atypicalities in tactile processing are reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) but it remains unknown if they precede and associate with traits of these disorders emerging in childhood. We investigated behavioural and neural markers of tactile sensory processing in infants at eleva...

The aim of this study was to explore the associations between temperamental reactivity and regulation and the emergence of anxiety traits in a longitudinal sample of infants enriched for later ASD. Parents of 143 infants who were at high- and low-risk for ASD rated their child’s temperament traits when they were 9, 15 and 24 months old; they rated...

Identifying developmental endophenotypes on the pathway between genetics and behavior is critical to uncovering the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental conditions. In this proof-of-principle study, we explored whether early disruptions in visual attention are a unique or shared candidate endophenotype of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and atte...

Shared difficulties with cognitive control may play a role in co-occurring mental health problems frequently observed in autistic children. We investigated how different cognitive control processes (inhibitory control, conflict resolution, cognitive flexibility) associated with traits of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivi...

Individual differences in infants’ engagement with their environment manifest early in development and are noticed by parents. Three views have been advanced to explain differences in seeking novel stimulation. The optimal stimulation hypothesis suggests that individuals seek further stimulation when they are under-responsive to sensory input. The...

Background Previous research has suggested that atypical attention in autism might be driven by a preference for sameness over novelty. There is also evidence of slower habituation to a repeating stimulus in autism. It is not known whether slower habituation is driven by atypically slower processing of repeating information or whether it is a manif...

Dimensional approaches to psychopathology interrogate the core neurocognitive domains interacting at the individual level to shape diagnostic symptoms. Embedding this approach in prospective longitudinal studies could transform our understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders. Such designs require us to move beyond tradit...

Impaired face processing is proposed to play a key role in the early development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to be an endophenotypic trait which indexes genetic risk for the disorder. However, no published work has examined the development of face processing abilities from infancy into the school-age years and how they relate to ASD sympt...

Impaired face processing is proposed to play a key role in the early development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to be an endophenotypic trait which indexes genetic risk for the disorder. However, no published work has examined the development of face processing abilities from infancy into the school-age years and how they relate to ASD sympt...

Human beings typically prefer social stimuli (e.g. faces, smiles) over nonsocial stimuli. This social preference is believed to be an essential building block for later social skills and healthy social development. Measuring social preference poses an empirical challenge, as it encompasses multiple underlying processes. In this study, we use a pref...

Reduced gaze following has been associated previously with lower language scores in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we use eye-tracking in a controlled experimental setting to investigate whether gaze following and attention distribution during a word learning task associate with later developmental and clinical outcomes in a po...

Autistic individuals can be socially motivated. We disagree with the idea that self-report is sufficient to understand their social drive. Instead, we underscore evidence for typical non-verbal signatures of social reward during the early development of autistic individuals. Instead of focusing on whether or not social motivation is typical, resear...

Background: Reduced executive functions (EF) are commonly associated with developmental conditions (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, ASD; attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ADHD), although EF seems to be typical in children with callous unemotional (CU) traits. Regulatory function (RF) is a proposed infant precursor that maps on onto factors...

Reduced gaze following has been associated previously with lower language scores in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we use eye-tracking in a controlled experimental setting to investigate whether gaze following and attention distribution during a word learning task associate with later developmental and clinical outcomes in a pop...

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was pr...

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was pr...

Dysregulation of cortical excitation/inhibition (E/I) has been proposed as a neuropathological mechanism underlying core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Determining whether dysregulated E/I could contribute to the emergence of behavioural symptoms of ASD requires evidence from human infants prior to diagnosis. In this prospective longit...

Parents participating in a prospective longitudinal study of infants with older siblings with autism completed an autism screening questionnaire and were asked about any concerns relating to their child’s development, and children were administered an interactive assessment conducted by a researcher at 14 months. Scores on the parent questionnaire...

Background Difficulties with executive functioning (EF) are common in individuals with a range of developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Interventions that target underlying mechanisms of EF early in development could be broadly beneficial, but require infant markers of such mechanisms in order to be feasible. Prospectiv...

Faces capture and maintain infants’ attention more than other visual stimuli. The present study addresses the impact of early language experience on attention to faces in infancy. It was hypothesized that infants learning two spoken languages (unimodal bilinguals) and hearing infants of Deaf mothers learning British Sign Language and spoken English...

Infants’ minutes long babbling bouts or repetitive reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell apart active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed beh...

This study investigated whether habituation and novelty preference were reduced in typically developing children with higher traits of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as compared to children with lower traits. We also investigated the stimulus dependence of these differences, that is, whether differences in novelty preference were dependent on stimu...

Infant's minutes long babbling bouts or energetic reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behaviour?...

[Accepted at Infant Behavior and Development] In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the ex...

In adults, affective touch leads to widespread activation of cortical areas including posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS) and Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG). Using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we asked whether similar areas are activated in 5-month-old infants, by comparing affective to non-affective touch. We contrasted a hum...

Background Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have co‐occurring symptoms of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and/or anxiety. It is unclear whether these disorders arise from shared or distinct developmental pathways. We explored this question by testing the specificity of early‐life (infant and toddler) predictors of...

Infants learn from social communication, and ostensive-referential communication is argued to be pivotal in this respect. Yoon, Johnson and Csibra (2008) found that after viewing a communicative scene, 9-month-olds detected object identity changes more than object location changes. But after viewing a non-communicative scene, infants detected objec...

In adults, affective touch leads to widespread activation of cortical areas including posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS) and Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG). Using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we asked whether similar areas are activated in 5-month-old infants, by comparing affective to non-affective touch. We contrasted a hum...

In adults, affective touch leads to widespread activation of cortical areas including posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS) and Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG). Using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we asked whether similar areas are activated in 5-month-old infants, by comparing affective to non-affective touch. We contrasted a hum...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting around 1% of the population. We previously discovered that infant siblings of children with ASD had stronger pupillary light reflexes compared to low-risk infants, a result which contrasts sharply with the weak pupillary light reflex typically seen in both children and adult...