New lab paper in Neurophotonics!

Thrilled to share our new paper, led by the brilliant Addison Billing: Maternal anxiety shapes prediction error responses in the infant brain, just out in Neurophotonics.

This study marks a real methodological breakthrough using a new optical imaging approach, high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), we were able to measure medial prefrontal cortex function in awake, behaving infants for the first time.

Addison combined HD-DOT with eye-tracking while 6–8-month-old infants watched a simple audiovisual sequence in which expected outcomes were occasionally violated, eliciting prediction errors.

The results show that infants whose mothers reported higher anxiety displayed stronger medial prefrontal responses to these unexpected events; a striking early link between maternal mood and infant brain function.

Huge congratulations to Addison for this technically and conceptually ambitious work which represents an exciting step forward for developmental cognitive neuroscience!