Neonatal multi-modal cortical profiles predict 18-month developmental outcomes

Developmental delays in infanthood often persist, turning into life-long difficulties, and coming at great cost for the individual and community. By examining the developing brain and its relation to developmental outcomes we can start to elucidate how the emergence of brain circuits is manifested in variability of infant motor, cognitive and behavioural capacities. In this study, we examined if cortical structural covariance at birth, indexing coordinated development, is related to later infant behaviour. We included 193 healthy term-born infants from the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP). An individual cortical connectivity matrix derived from morphological and microstructural features was computed for each subject (morphometric similarity networks, MSNs) and was used as input for prediction of behavioural scores at 18 months using Connectome-Based Predictive Modeling (CPM). Neonatal MSNs successfully predicted language and social-emotional performance. Predictive edges were distributed between and within known functional cortical divisions with a specific important role for primary and posterior cortical regions. These results reveal that multi-modal neonatal cortical profiles showing coordinated maturation are related to developmental outcomes and that network organization at birth provides an early infrastructure for future functional skills.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

Infant categorization as a dynamic process linked to memory

Recency effects are well documented in the adult and infant literature: recognition and recall memory are better for recently occurring events. We explore recency effects in infant categorization, which does not merely involve memory for individual items, but the formation of abstract category representations. We present a computational model of infant categorization that simulates category learning in 10-month-olds. The model predicts that recency effects outweigh previously reported order effects for the same stimuli. According to the model, infant behaviour at test should depend mainly on the identity of the most recent training item. We evaluate these predictions in a series of experiments with 10-month-old infants. Our results show that infant behaviour confirms the model’s prediction. In particular, at test infants exhibited a preference for a category outlier over the category average only if the final training item had been close to the average, rather than distant from it. Our results are consistent with a view of categorization as a highly dynamic process where the end result of category learning is not the overall average of all stimuli encountered, but rather a fluid representation that moves depending on moment-to-moment novelty. We argue that this is a desirable property of a flexible cognitive system that adapts rapidly to different contexts.

Infant behaviour and maternal adaptation after uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact for 1 hour following birth in northern Uganda

Background/aims Uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact in the first hour after birth increases the chance of exclusive breastfeeding, a practice which improves health outcomes for both mothers and neonates. This study aimed to compare mother–infant pairs who had or did not have skin-to-skin contact 1 hour after birth and investigate infant behaviour and maternal adaptation as a result. Methods This study investigated the impact of skin-to-skin contact on a number of health indicators after birth of both mother and child. Two groups were included: 51 mother–infant pairs with skin-to-skin contact and 152 with no skin-to-skin contact, who were observed for 1 hour after birth. Mothers were interviewed at discharge and at 14 weeks postpartum about their sociodemographic background, ability to interpret their infant's signals and interaction with the infant, their own health and their infant's health and feeding. The Student's t-test and Chi squared test were used to assess the associations between the groups and sociodemographic characteristics. The Cramer's V test was used to assess the effect size for variable latch on. Factor analysis was conducted on statements from interviews on mothers' feelings regarding motherhood. Results More infants latched on in the skin-to-skin contact group and the first breastfeeding was more often directed by the infants, compared to the no skin-to-skin contact group. Mothers in the skin-to-skin contact group were less likely to need help to breastfeed and tended to be more confident that they could provide sufficient milk for their child. They were also more likely to breastfeed longer and took no initiative to supplement the infant during the hospital stay, while mothers in the non-skin-to-skin contact group did so. More mothers in the skin-to-skin contact group believed that their infant could comfort itself. Conclusions The results suggest benefits to uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact between mothers and newborns 1 hour after birth in regard to initiation of breastfeeding, intended time to breastfeed, maternal self-confidence and infant self-regulation. Interventions to promote skin-to-skin contact should be implemented in this setting.

Maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index and offspring temperament at 3 months

Introduction: Pre-pregnancy obesity has been linked to emotional and behavioural problems in offspring, though it remains unclear when the presence of these difficulties first emerges. Method: We examined the association between maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and temperament at 3 months of age in the offspring of 16 women residing in Hamilton, Ontario. Infant temperament was measured using the Infant Behaviour Questionnaire Revised, which specifically examined surgency/extraversion, negative affectivity, and orienting/regulation. Results: A statistically significant association was observed between maternal BMI and infant negative affectivity (B=0.05, 95% CI=0.01-0.08), which remained significant after adjusting for confounding variables (B=0.04, 95% CI=0.01-0.08). Conclusion: The current study provides evidence that fetal exposure to high maternal BMI during pregnancy is associated with increased negative affectivity in infants at 3 months of age. The results suggest that the intrauterine environment associated with high maternal BMI may influence temperament at a very early stage in development.