Scientists have observed that an area of the brain which responds in adults to social interaction also responds in babies who are just a few hours old. The discovery may open-up a new approach to the study of those at risk of developmental disorders such as autism from the first days of life.
Researchers from Birkbeck’s Babylab at the University of London and the Università di Padova, Italy observed that as little as 24 hours after birth the “social brain” can already tell the difference between social interactions, such as playing “peekaboo”, and non-social movement such as an arm manipulating an object.Previously, the earliest observations of brain responses to social human actions were in four-month-old babies, who had already had thousands of hours of face-to-face communication and could have learned to respond to these social stimuli through that human contact.
The study, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, also showed that the strength of the observed response to social cues increased significantly with the number of hours following birth, indicating that face to face interactions, even within the first few hours of life, play an important role in the development of the social brain.
All of the children in the study were classed as low risk for developmental disorders and Babylab researcher Dr Sarah Lloyd Fox says that the study improves our understanding of what brain activity related to social cues should look like in typically developing babies. “Eventually, we may be able to compare this to the brain activity of infants who are classed as high-risk for autism to see whether they display differences in these brain responses from birth”, she says.
If successful, the team hope that this kind of analysis could lead to earlier diagnosis of autism.
