1
|
Nowling D, Crum KI, Joseph J. Sex differences in development of functional connections in the face processing network. J Neuroimaging 2024; 34:280-290. [PMID: 38169075 PMCID: PMC10939922 DOI: 10.1111/jon.13185] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/16/2023] [Revised: 12/16/2023] [Accepted: 12/18/2023] [Indexed: 01/05/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Understanding sex differences in typical development of the face processing network is important for elucidating disruptions during atypical development in sex-linked developmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder. Based on prior sex difference studies in other cognitive domains, this study examined whether females show increased integration of core and extended face regions with age for face viewing, while males would show increased segregation. METHODS This study used a cross-sectional design with typically developing children and adults (n = 133) and a functional MRI face localizer task. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis examined functional connectivity between canonical and extended face processing network regions with age, with greater segregation indexed by decreased core-extended region connectivity with age and greater integration indexed by increased core-extended region connectivity with age. RESULTS PPI analysis confirmed increased segregation for males-right fusiform face area (FFA) coupling to right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) opercular when viewing faces and left amygdala when viewing objects decreased with age. Females showed increased integration with age (increased coupling of the right FFA to right IFG opercular region and right occipital face area [OFA] to right IFG orbital when viewing faces and objects, respectively) and increased segregation (decreased coupling with age of the right OFA with IFG opercular region when viewing faces). CONCLUSIONS Development of core and extended face processing network connectivity follows sexually dimorphic paths. These differential changes mostly occur across childhood and adolescence, with males experiencing segregation and females both segregation and integration changes in connectivity.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Duncan Nowling
- Department of Neuroscience, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
| | - Kathleen I. Crum
- Department of Neuroscience, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
- Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN
| | - Jane Joseph
- Department of Neuroscience, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Bigelow FJ, Clark GM, Lum JAG, Enticott PG. Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study. Dev Cogn Neurosci 2022; 53:101052. [PMID: 34954666 PMCID: PMC8717415 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2021.101052] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/09/2021] [Revised: 11/22/2021] [Accepted: 12/15/2021] [Indexed: 12/01/2022] Open
Abstract
Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4-12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Felicity J Bigelow
- Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.
| | - Gillian M Clark
- Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia
| | - Jarrad A G Lum
- Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia
| | - Peter G Enticott
- Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Nunes AS, Mamashli F, Kozhemiako N, Khan S, McGuiggan NM, Losh A, Joseph RM, Ahveninen J, Doesburg SM, Hämäläinen MS, Kenet T. Classification of evoked responses to inverted faces reveals both spatial and temporal cortical response abnormalities in Autism spectrum disorder. Neuroimage Clin 2020; 29:102501. [PMID: 33310630 PMCID: PMC7734307 DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2020.102501] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/05/2020] [Revised: 11/03/2020] [Accepted: 11/07/2020] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
Abstract
The neurophysiology of face processing has been studied extensively in the context of social impairments associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the existing studies have concentrated mainly on univariate analyses of responses to upright faces, and, less frequently, inverted faces. The small number of existing studies on neurophysiological responses to inverted face in ASD have used univariate approaches, with divergent results. Here, we used a data-driven, classification-based, multivariate machine learning decoding approach to investigate the temporal and spatial properties of the neurophysiological evoked response for upright and inverted faces, relative to the neurophysiological evoked response for houses, a neutral stimulus. 21 (2 females) ASD and 29 (4 females) TD participants ages 7 to 19 took part in this study. Group level classification accuracies were obtained for each condition, using first the temporal domain of the evoked responses, and then the spatial distribution of the evoked responses on the cortical surface, each separately. We found that classification of responses to inverted neutral faces vs. houses was less accurate in ASD compared to TD, in both the temporal and spatial domains. In contrast, there were no group differences in the classification of evoked responses to upright neutral faces relative to houses. Using the classification in the temporal domain, lower decoding accuracies in ASD were found around 120 ms and 170 ms, corresponding the known components of the evoked responses to faces. Using the classification in the spatial domain, lower decoding accuracies in ASD were found in the right superior marginal gyrus (SMG), intra-parietal sulcus (IPS) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), but not in core face processing areas. Importantly, individual classification accuracies from both the temporal and spatial classifiers correlated with ASD severity, confirming the relevance of the results to the ASD phenotype.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Adonay S Nunes
- Department of Neurology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
| | - Fahimeh Mamashli
- Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Nataliia Kozhemiako
- Department of Neurology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
| | - Sheraz Khan
- Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Nicole M McGuiggan
- Department of Neurology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Ainsley Losh
- Department of Neurology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | | | - Jyrki Ahveninen
- Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA
| | - Sam M Doesburg
- Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
| | - Matti S Hämäläinen
- Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA; Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland
| | - Tal Kenet
- Department of Neurology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST, Charlestown, MA, USA.
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Lochy A, de Heering A, Rossion B. The non-linear development of the right hemispheric specialization for human face perception. Neuropsychologia 2017; 126:10-19. [PMID: 28655606 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.06.029] [Citation(s) in RCA: 22] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/01/2017] [Revised: 06/23/2017] [Accepted: 06/23/2017] [Indexed: 12/23/2022]
Abstract
The developmental origins of human adults' right hemispheric specialization for face perception remain unclear. On the one hand, infant studies have shown a right hemispheric advantage for face perception. On the other hand, it has been proposed that the adult right hemispheric lateralization for face perception slowly emerges during childhood due to reading acquisition, which increases left lateralized posterior responses to competing written material (e.g., visual letters and words). Since methodological approaches used in infant and children typically differ when their face capabilities are explored, resolving this issue has been difficult. Here we tested 5-year-old preschoolers varying in their level of visual letter knowledge with the same fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) paradigm leading to strongly right lateralized electrophysiological occipito-temporal face-selective responses in 4- to 6-month-old infants (de Heering and Rossion, 2015). Children's face-selective response was quantitatively larger and differed in scalp topography from infants', but did not differ across hemispheres. There was a small positive correlation between preschoolers' letter knowledge and a non-normalized index of right hemispheric specialization for faces. These observations show that previous discrepant results in the literature reflect a genuine nonlinear development of the neural processes underlying face perception and are not merely due to methodological differences across age groups. We discuss several factors that could contribute to the adult right hemispheric lateralization for faces, such as myelination of the corpus callosum and reading acquisition. Our findings point to the value of FPVS coupled with electroencephalography to assess specialized face perception processes throughout development with the same methodology.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Aliette Lochy
- Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, Belgium.
| | - Adélaïde de Heering
- UNESCOG, Center for Cognition & Neurosciences, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
| | - Bruno Rossion
- Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, Belgium; Neurology Unit, Centre Hospitalier Regional Universitaire (CHRU) de Nancy, F-54000 Nancy, France
| |
Collapse
|
5
|
Zhu X, Bhatt RS, Joseph JE. Pruning or tuning? Maturational profiles of face specialization during typical development. Brain Behav 2016; 6:e00464. [PMID: 27313976 PMCID: PMC4907975 DOI: 10.1002/brb3.464] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/05/2015] [Revised: 01/14/2016] [Accepted: 03/04/2016] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Face processing undergoes significant developmental change with age. Two kinds of developmental changes in face specialization were examined in this study: specialized maturation, or the continued tuning of a region to faces but little change in the tuning to other categories; and competitive interactions, or the continued tuning to faces accompanied by decreased tuning to nonfaces (i.e., pruning). METHODS Using fMRI, in regions where adults showed a face preference, a face- and object-specialization index were computed for younger children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years) and adults (18-45 years). The specialization index was scaled to each subject's maximum activation magnitude in each region to control for overall age differences in the activation level. RESULTS Although no regions showed significant face specialization in the younger age group, regions strongly associated with social cognition (e.g., right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior orbital cortex) showed specialized maturation, in which tuning to faces increased with age but there was no pruning of nonface responses. Conversely, regions that are associated with more basic perceptual processing or motor mirroring (right middle temporal cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right inferior frontal opercular cortex) showed competitive interactions in which tuning to faces was accompanied by pruning of object responses with age. CONCLUSIONS The overall findings suggest that cortical maturation for face processing is regional-specific and involves both increased tuning to faces and diminished response to nonfaces. Regions that show competitive interactions likely support a more generalized function that is co-opted for face processing with development, whereas regions that show specialized maturation increase their tuning to faces, potentially in an activity-dependent, experience-driven manner.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Xun Zhu
- Department of Psychology Shihezi University Xinjiang China; Department of Neurosciences Medical University of South Carolina Charleston South Carolina 29425
| | - Ramesh S Bhatt
- Department of Psychology College of Arts and Sciences University of Kentucky Lexington Kentucky 40506
| | - Jane E Joseph
- Department of Neurosciences Medical University of South Carolina Charleston South Carolina 29425
| |
Collapse
|