Face specific neural anticipatory activity in infants 4 and 9 months old

The possibility of predicting the specific features of forthcoming environmental events is fundamental for our survival since it allows us to proactively regulate our behaviour, enhancing our chance of survival. This is particularly crucial for stimuli providing socially relevant information for communication and interaction, such as faces. While it has been consistently demonstrated that the human brain shows preferential and ontogenetically early face-evoked activity, it is unknown whether specialized neural routes are engaged by face-predictive activity early in life. In this study, we recorded high-density electrophysiological (ERP) activity in adults and 9- and 4-month-old infants undergoing an audio-visual paradigm purposely designed to predict the appearance of faces or objects starting from congruent auditory cues (i.e., human voice vs nonhuman sounds). Contingent negative variation or CNV was measured to investigate anticipatory activity as a reliable marker of stimulus expectancy even in the absence of explicit motor demand. The results suggest that CNV can also be reliably elicited in the youngest group of 4-month-old infants, providing further evidence that expectation-related anticipatory activity is an intrinsic, early property of the human cortex. Crucially, the findings also indicate that the predictive information provided by the cue (i.e., human voice vs nonhuman sounds) turns into the recruitment of different anticipatory neural dynamics for faces and objects.