A one-hour sleep restriction impacts brain processing in young children across tasks: evidence from event-related potentials.

The effect of mild sleep restriction on cognitive functioning in young children is unclear, yet sleep loss may impact children's abilities to attend to tasks with high processing demands. In a preliminary investigation, six children (6.6-8.3 years of age) with normal sleep patterns performed three tasks: attention ("Oddball"), speech perception (consonant-vowel syllables), and executive function (Directional Stroop). Event-related potentials (ERPs) responses were recorded before (Control) and following 1 week of 1-hour per day of sleep restriction. Brain activity across all tasks following Sleep Restriction differed from activity during Control Sleep, indicating that minor sleep restriction impacts children's neurocognitive functioning.

Neonatal auditory evoked responses are related to perinatal maternal anxiety.

Maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy are related to negative developmental outcomes for offspring, both physiological and psychological, from the fetal period through early adolescence. This robust relationship is likely to be partly explained by alterations in fetal neurodevelopmental programming, calling for further examination of neurophysiologically-based cognitive markers that may be related to the altered structure-function relationships that contribute to these negative developmental outcomes. The current investigation examined the relationship between perinatal maternal anxiety and neonatal auditory evoked responses (AERs) to mother and stranger voices. Results indicated that neonates of low-anxiety mothers displayed more negative frontal slow wave amplitudes in response to their mother's voice compared to a female stranger's voice, while neonates of high-anxiety mothers showed the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that neonates of perinatally anxious mothers may demonstrate neurophysiologically-based differences in attentional allocation. This could represent one pathway to the negative psychological outcomes seen throughout development in offspring of anxious mothers.

Sleep-disordered breathing affects auditory processing in 5-7-year-old children: evidence from brain recordings.

Poor sleep in children is associated with lower neurocognitive functioning and increased maladaptive behaviors. The current study examined the impact of snoring (the most common manifestation of sleep-disordered breathing) on cognitive and brain functioning in a sample of 35 asymptomatic children ages 5-7 years identified in the community as having habitual snoring (SDB). All participants completed polysomnographic, neurocognitive (NEPSY), and psychophysiological (event-related potentials [ERPs] to speech sounds) assessments. The results indicated that sub-clinical levels of SDB may not necessarily lead to reduced performance on standardized behavioral measures of attention and memory. However, brain indices of speech perception and discrimination (N1/P2) are sensitive to individual differences in the quality of sleep. We postulate that addition of ERPs to the standard clinical measures of sleep problems could lead to early identification of children who may be more cognitively vulnerable because of chronic sleep disturbances.

ERP correlates of noun and verb processing in preschool-age children.

Indices of discrimination between words of different syntactic classes were examined in a group of 22 preschool-age children utilizing event-related potential (ERP) procedures. Video taped scenes depicted an actor performing actions with a set of toys. ERPs were recorded to spoken nouns or verbs that either matched or failed to match the action name or object name in the video scene. ERPs were analyzed using peak amplitude-ANOVA procedures and principal components analysis-ANOVA. Results indicated good convergence across analysis approaches. More specifically, P100 and N220 varied bilaterally over frontal electrode sites and discriminated between different syntactic classes for both match and mismatch situations. Based on comparisons with adult data from previous work [Molfese, D.L., Burger-Judisch, L., Gill, L.A., Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., 1996. Electrophysiological correlates of noun-verb processing in adults. Brain and Language 54 388-413], it is suggested that the pattern of brain involvement underlying syntactic class discriminations undergo developmental changes between the preschool years and adulthood.

ERP indicators of learning in adults.

This study investigated learning-related changes in the brain activity of young adults. A group of 29 undergraduate students (18-24 years) participated in a learning study that included a pretest, a training session, and a posttest. Each trial involved presentation of a complex visual stimulus and its spoken "name." Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in response to matching and mismatching names. In the pretest, the participants guessed whether the names were matching the figures. During training they learned the names of a set of simple elements making up the complex figures and were required to master a simple rule for combining the visual and auditory stimuli. The posttest included presentation of the combinations learned during training as well as novel pairings of the same elements. Following training the number of correct responses for learned items doubled and the amplitudes of the auditory ERPs to learned and rule transfer stimuli were more positive than brain waves to the not learned or novel items over most of the analysis window. The ERPs further differentiated between a familiarity response (late positive shift) and learning-specific changes (N2-P3 range). Overall, the findings suggest that ERPs can be a useful tool for learning assessment and offer new insights in the study of individual differences associated with the learning process.