Interestingly our significant associations between neonatal

Interestingly, our significant associations between neonatal EEG power and neurocognitive processes were specific to memory via visual paired comparison (VPC) paradigm and auditory comprehension language scores only. Compared to deferred imitation (DI), which involves memory recall after a delay and requires some motoric ability, VPC is a passive perceptual task assessing novelty object preference. Although, like all cognitive functions, both DI and VPC require attention, past studies have linked individual differences in VPC to both infants’ ability to distribute attention between stimuli during behavioral tasks (Rose et al., 2003) and infants’ neural responses of attention measured by event-related potentials (de Haan, 2007). Additionally, as the auditory environment is vital to the development of efficient native language processing (Fernald et al., 2013; Kuhl, 2007; Melvin et al., 2016), a recent study has reported that both active and passive non-linguistic acoustic experience during the first year of life impacts prelinguistic acoustic Metformin mapping. Using ERPs, these researchers demonstrated that this experience increases perceptual attention to environmental acoustic stimuli (Benasich et al., 2014), which suggests that nonlinguistic acoustic experience during early development may help the infant process later linguistically relevant environmental cues. There are several limitations to the current study that should be addressed in future work. Although the sample size in the current study was larger than most studies reporting associations between resting EEG and cognitive performance (Benasich et al., 2008; Gou et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2012) or SES (Tomalski et al., 2013) during infancy, the socioeconomic range, although distributed, did not oversample families in the lowest extremes. It is possible that a study with a larger sample of families under the poverty line may find SES disparities in neonatal EEG or in cognitive skills at 15-months of age, as socioeconomic disparities in child development are often nonlinear, with the greatest differences found at the low end of the income distribution (Duncan and Magnuson, 2012). Additionally, we cannot say with certainty whether the associations between neonatal EEG and cognitive skills at 15-months reported here are indicative of causal relations. Nonetheless, Monolayer is plausible that some underlying level of neural activity at birth, particularly in the high-frequency bands often linked to attentional abilities, would continue to be correlated with tasks that tap into sensory or perceptual processes related to memory and language. We also note that, although significant variation in 15-month cognitive skills could be explained by neonatal EEG power, effect sizes were small (’s=0.12). Future studies using high-density EEG recordings and 128 lead multi-electrode nets are needed to replicate the EEG power results. Increasing the number of electrodes improves spatial resolution, making it possible to record cerebral activities that are more difficult to localize; resulting in genuine source localization of neonatal EEG (Odabaee et al., 2013). Additionally, spatial sampling error for infants, in comparison to adults, is much larger − a spatial sampling error of less than 10% for an adult can be obtained with a 64-electrode array, but a 256-electrode array is needed for an infant to achieve the same level of error (Grieve et al., 2004). Improving measurement accuracy of EEG spatial properties and extending to findings of functional connectivity, via EEG coherence, (Myers et al., 2015) would strengthen our current results.
Conflict of interest
Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the PASS Research Network for providing data for this work. We also gratefully acknowledge Laura Engelhardt and Luke Mack who made significant contributions to this research. This publication was supported by NIH Grants UL1TR000040, R37HD032773 and U01HD045935.