Thinakaran Abigaël, Fulcher Tess, Chung Haerin, Woodward Amanda, Colomer Marc
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Aug 11;15(1):29406. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-13713-w.
Most previous studies investigating early neural predictors of Executive Function (EF) abilities focused on resting-state brain activity in infancy, with mixed findings. Here, we investigated early neural predictors of later-emerging EF abilities by measuring task-related changes in brain activity, which we argue to be more sensitive to detecting individual differences in EF skills. Sixty-six 9-month-old infants participated in an action observation and execution task, while their brain activity was recorded. Two conditions were used, which required different levels of cognitive control and social engagement: one group of infants saw an experimenter performing actions in consecutive trials and then performed similar actions themselves (the Blocked condition), while the other group performed the actions, taking turns with the experimenter (the Interleaved condition). At age five, 45 of the original infants returned for follow-up assessments and completed a battery of well-established EF tasks. Of these 45 participants, 35 infants provided usable neural data at 9 months and behavioral EF data at age 5 and were included in the final analysis. Results revealed a close link between infants' neural activity and their EF abilities that were specific to frontal theta oscillations, a neural component associated with high-order cognition, and to the Interleaved condition, which was the condition that required greater attentional control and social engagement from infants. The results highlight the importance of selecting appropriate tasks and neural measures to detect longitudinal brain-behavior relations.
以往大多数研究执行功能（EF）能力早期神经预测指标的研究都聚焦于婴儿期的静息态脑活动，结果不一。在此，我们通过测量与任务相关的脑活动变化来研究后期出现的EF能力的早期神经预测指标，我们认为这种方法对检测EF技能的个体差异更为敏感。66名9个月大的婴儿参与了一项动作观察与执行任务，同时记录他们的脑活动。使用了两种条件，这两种条件需要不同程度的认知控制和社交参与：一组婴儿在连续试验中看到实验者执行动作，然后自己执行类似动作（分组条件），而另一组与实验者轮流执行动作（交错条件）。在5岁时，最初的66名婴儿中有45名返回进行随访评估，并完成了一系列成熟的EF任务。在这45名参与者中，35名婴儿在9个月时提供了可用的神经数据，在5岁时提供了行为EF数据，并被纳入最终分析。结果显示，婴儿的神经活动与他们的EF能力之间存在紧密联系，这种联系特定于额叶θ振荡，这是一种与高阶认知相关的神经成分，并且与交错条件有关，交错条件是要求婴儿有更大注意力控制和社交参与的条件。这些结果凸显了选择合适的任务和神经测量方法以检测纵向脑-行为关系的重要性。
