Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, 38068 Rovereto, Italy;
Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Mar 5;116(10):4625-4630. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1812419116. Epub 2019 Feb 12.
Humans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that, in adults, is supported by a set of face-specific cortical patches. Human newborns, already shortly after birth, preferentially orient to faces, even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometrical patterns vs. perceptually equivalent nonfacelike stimuli. The neural substrates underlying this early preference are still largely unexplored. Is the adult face-specific cortical circuit already active at birth, or does its specialization develop slowly as a function of experience and/or maturation? We measured EEG responses in 1- to 4-day-old awake, attentive human newborns to schematic facelike patterns and nonfacelike control stimuli, visually presented with slow oscillatory "peekaboo" dynamics (0.8 Hz) in a frequency-tagging design. Despite the limited duration of newborns' attention, reliable frequency-tagged responses could be estimated for each stimulus from the peak of the EEG power spectrum at the stimulation frequency. Upright facelike stimuli elicited a significantly stronger frequency-tagged response than inverted facelike controls in a large set of electrodes. Source reconstruction of the underlying cortical activity revealed the recruitment of a partially right-lateralized network comprising lateral occipitotemporal and medial parietal areas overlapping with the adult face-processing circuit. This result suggests that the cortical route specialized in face processing is already functional at birth.
人类具有出色的面孔识别能力,这种能力在成年人中得到了一组特定于面孔的皮质斑块的支持。新生儿在出生后不久就已经能够优先感知面孔,即使它们是以高度简化的几何图案形式呈现的,而不是感知上等效的非面孔刺激。这种早期偏好的神经基础在很大程度上仍未被探索。成人特有的面部皮质回路是否在出生时就已经活跃,还是随着经验和/或成熟而缓慢专业化?我们在 1 至 4 天大的清醒、专注的新生儿中测量了 EEG 反应,这些新生儿对简化的面孔图案和非面孔控制刺激有反应,这些刺激以缓慢的振荡“躲猫猫”动态(0.8 Hz)以频率标记设计呈现。尽管新生儿的注意力持续时间有限,但仍可以从 EEG 功率谱在刺激频率处的峰值估计每个刺激的可靠频率标记响应。直立的简化面孔刺激比倒置的简化面孔控制刺激在大量电极中引起了更强的频率标记响应。对潜在皮质活动的源重建揭示了一个部分右侧化网络的招募,该网络包括外侧枕颞区和内侧顶区,与成人面部处理回路重叠。这一结果表明,专门用于面部处理的皮质通路在出生时就已经具有功能。