Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, United States.
Behav Brain Res. 2011 Aug 1;221(1):91-7. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2011.02.047. Epub 2011 Mar 4.
Novelty and surprises differentially modify the left and right sides of the brain. Here we show that repeated brief exposures to the novelty of a non-home environment during infancy and early adulthood lead to long-lasting changes in adulthood in the global bi-lateralization organization of the brain as indexed by a transiently detectable right-sided orientating bias upon the initial encounter with the novel environment. Most surprisingly, we show that in the same individuals, the short-term effect of the combined neonatal and adulthood novelty exposures on functional brain asymmetry measured at young adulthood (5 months of age) is distinctively different from the long-term effect measured at late adulthood (15 months of age). These results suggest that long-lasting, cumulative effects of early life experience on brain and behavior organization are not necessarily permanent, but continue to unfold, presumably via interactions with a multitude of unmonitored intervening life events.
新颖性和惊喜会以不同的方式改变大脑的左右两侧。在这里，我们表明，在婴儿期和成年早期，反复短暂地接触非家庭环境的新奇事物，会导致成年后大脑双侧整体组织的长期变化，其表现为在初次遇到新环境时，会出现短暂的右侧定向偏差。最令人惊讶的是，我们发现，在相同个体中，新生儿期和成年期新奇事物暴露的短期效应，在成年早期（5 个月大时）测量的功能性大脑不对称性上，与在成年晚期（15 个月大时）测量的长期效应明显不同。这些结果表明，早期生活经历对大脑和行为组织的持久、累积效应不一定是永久性的，而是会继续展开，可能是通过与大量未监测到的中间生活事件的相互作用。
