Neural correlates of novelty-evoked distress in 4-month-old infants: A synthetic cohort study.

BACKGROUND: Observational assessments of infant temperament have provided unparalleled insight into prediction of risk for social anxiety. Yet, it is challenging to administer and score these assessments alongside high-quality infant neuroimaging data. The current study aims to identify infant resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) associated with both parent-report and observed behavioral estimates of infant novelty-evoked distress.

METHODS: Using data from the Origins of Infant Temperament (OIT) study which includes deep phenotyping of infant temperament, we identified parent-report measures that were associated with observed novelty-evoked distress. These parent-report measures were then summarized into a composite score used for imaging analysis. Our infant MRI sample was a "synthetic cohort", harmonizing data from two fMRI studies of 4-month-old infants (OIT and Baby Connectome Project [BCP]; n=101) both of which included parent-reported temperament. Brain-behavior associations were evaluated using "enrichment," a statistical approach that quantifies the clustering of brain-behavior associations within network pairs.

RESULTS: Results demonstrated that parent-report composites of novelty-evoked distress were significantly associated with three network pairs: Dorsal Attention-Salience/Ventral Attention, Dorsal Attention-Default, and Dorsal Attention-Control. These network pairs demonstrated negative associations with novelty-evoked distress-indicating that less connectivity between these network pairs was associated with greater novelty-evoked distress. Additional analyses demonstrated that Dorsal Attention -Control network connectivity was associated with observed novelty-evoked distress in the OIT sample (n=38).

CONCLUSION: Overall, this work is broadly consistent with existing work and implicates dorsal attention network connectivity in novelty-evoked distress. This study provides novel data on the neural basis of infant novelty-evoked distress.