hdl:10101/npre.2009.2917.1
Document Type:
Manuscript
Date:
Received 03 March 2009 08:40 UTC; Posted 03 March 2009
Subjects:
Developmental Biology, Neuroscience
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Abstract:

A fundamental property of most animals is the ability to see whether an object is approaching on a direct collision course and, if so, when it will collide. Using high-density electroencephalography in 5- to 11-month-old infants and a looming stimulus approaching under three different accelerations, we investigated how the young human nervous system extracts and processes information for impending collision. Here we show that infants' looming related brain activity is characterized by theta oscillations. Source analyses reveal clear localised activity in the visual cortex. Analysing the temporal dynamics of the source waveform, we provide evidence that the temporal structure of different looming stimuli is sustained during processing in the more mature infant brain, providing infants with increasingly veridical time-to-collision information about looming danger as they grow older and become mobile.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
How to cite this document:

van der Weel, Ruud and van der Meer, Audrey. Temporal dynamics of travelling theta wave activity in infants responding to visual looming. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.2917.1> (2009)

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