18 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2026
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    The long‐term effects of institutional rearing, foster care intervention and disruptions in care on brain electrical activity in adolescence
    6
    1. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      Previous studies have reported that institutional rearing andadversity in early life lead to a reduction in cortical thickness (Kellyet al., 2013; McLaughlin et al., 2014), decreased white matter vol‐ume (Sheridan, Fox, Zeanah, McLaughlin, & Nelson, 2012) and whitematter connectivity (Tendolkar, Mårtensson, Kühn, Klumpers, &Fernández, 2018).

      There's broader implications than just institutional rearing to these findings. Early childhood adversity can also result in these outcomes and it is essential to take that into consideration as well.

    2. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      Almas et al. (2018) examined the impact of disruptions in care‐giving on cognitive, behavioural and social outcomes at age 12 inthe BEIP cohort and found that caregiving disruptions predictedincreases in externalizing and internalizing behavior problems,even after controlling for internalizing and externalizing problemsin early childhood.

      Outside of looking at just EEG activity and cognitive development, behavioral and emotional disruptions can occur as a consequence of being raised in institutions. If not corrected early these issues can continue persist long-term and might contribute to the development of more severe disorders in the future.

    3. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      here were no associations between the age at placement andEEG power. But since the oldest children in the study were random‐ized at 31 months of age, the differences in EEG power between theFCG and CAUG are strong evidence for the importance of alteringearly trajectories.

      This demonstrates how getting children out of institutions early can play a huge role in affecting their developmental trajectory

    4. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      The results demonstrated the continuous positive effects of the fos‐ter care intervention. The foster care group (FCG) showed greateralpha and lower theta power than those who received care as usual(CAUG) as was found at 12‐year assessment.

      This is the key EEG finding. Greater alpha and lower theta power indicate more mature cortical regions and shows that family‑based care can shift the long‑term trajectory of brain activity after severe early deprivation.

    5. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      In the current study, we examine data from follow‐up measures ofresting‐state EEG in the BEIP at 16 years of age. The main goal of thisstudy was to examine the continuous effect of foster care interven‐tion on brain activity in children removed from institutions and placedinto foster care in infancy.

      Call back to the BEIP! This follows up with the children that were in this project and provides further findings that can be used to better understand the neurobiological consequences of being raised in an institution.

    6. Sybella.ss 19 May 2026
      Institutions often have a highchild‐to‐caregiver ratio, strict regimented schedules, a lack of sensi‐tivity to children's need and inadequate linguistic, cognitive and sen‐sory stimulation

      This clearly defines the characteristics that make institutions detrimental to the socioemotional development of children. These conditions are are in contrast to what might be seen in a health family system.

    Annotators

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    An Adolescent Sensitive Period for Social Dominance Hierarchy Plasticity Is Regulated by Cortical Plasticity Modulators in Mice
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    1. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      Our findings provideevidence of cortical plasticity modulators directly alteringbehavior in a social context and shed light on our understandingof the developmental tradeoff between behavioral stability andplasticity in the face of changing contexts.

      This paper showed how if Lynx1 or VPA can reopen social plasticity in adult mice, then targeted interventions along with positive social experiences could, potentially re-wire social behavior after adverse early experiences. However, the study never tested whether early social deprivation (e.g., isolation during the sensitive period) shifts the timing of when that window opens or closes.

    2. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      Therefore, adult re-opening ofjuvenile-like cortical plasticity with VPA treatment destabilizeshierarchies without further manipulation (such as unexpectedexperience of losing which was necessary to induce plasticity inhierarchy in adult Lynx1KO mice and adolescent WT mice).

      Interesting finding! VPA's effects go beyond simply just reopening the critical period but increasing the sensitivity to the entire social hierarchy system revealing how reopening critical periods can have broader effects than expected.

    3. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      We foundthat Lynx1KO animals had increased c-Fos activation in boththe dACC and the MD, suggesting activation of the dominancenetwork may be important for encoding the experience of lossleading to a subsequent decrease in dominance

      This points to the additional neural mechanisms involved in dominance status. By measuring c-Fos, the authors show that the same brain regions previously shown to regulate dominance rank are more activated in Lynx1 KO mice following loss.

    4. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      These findingsdemonstrate significant plasticity in social hierarchy based onexperience in adult animals with open-ended critical period forcortical plasticity, suggesting modulators of cortical plasticitymay regulate dominance hierarchy stability.

      Interesting how genetic influences like Lynx1 in this case play a role in re-opening of a critical period. Its likely that Lynx1 plays a role in a number of cortical areas and the effects of this knockout on those would be interesting to see.

    5. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      We found that adolescent mice (p35)showed significantly reduced DSs one day following forced loss,compared with the natural loss controls (Figure 1H). Overall,these findings suggest that stable social hierarchies are formedearly in the juvenile period, but that these hierarchies are plasticto experience during the adolescent period.

      Interesting finding! One social loss experience was enough to reshape an adolescent mouse's dominance rank within 24 hour but the adult mice given the identical experience showed no change.

    6. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      While much research in primary sensory cortical areas hasoutlined the specific mechanisms for regulating experience-dependent development and plasticity of circuitry mediatingsensory processing (Hensch, 2004; Morishita and Hensch, 2008),mechanisms regulating experience-dependent development ofPFC circuits are still poorly understood.

      This is the gap in research these authors are trying to fill; studying the prefrontal cortex which regulates social behavior, decision making, emotional regulation, etc. through the lens of experience-dependent development.

    Annotators

  4. Local file Local file
    Is there evidence for sensitive periods in emotional development?
    6
    1. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      In contrast, emotion appears to besets of emergent properties arising from multiple pro-cesses, each with its own maturational period. Someaspects of emotion, such as fear conditioning and stressregulation translate well between humans and non-human animals [32], while other aspects of emotionsuch as subjective feelings or accurate inferences ofothers’ feeling states are difficult to compare across spe-cies.

      Herein lies the difficulty with studying this critical period. Humans are unique in their socioemotional development and how its studied has to take into account broader aspects of human development.

    2. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      Recent work suggests that infancy may be a sensitiveperiod for an individual to learn to identify signals ofsafety, as these safety cues engage prefrontal inhibitorycircuits that prevent threat perception [41]. Caregivermaltreatment and deprivation during this period mayimpair children’s ability to learn cues of safety, andaccelerate learning of threat cues

      In terms of trying to study a specific discrete process within socioemotional development, fear learning and threat or safety detection might be something to explore because the circuitry involved is conserved across species.

    3. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      same degree of negative outcomes as did children whospent longer than six months in institutions [23,24].These differences in outcomes could be because of thetiming of the negative events (e.g. stressors before yearone may not be a sensitive period but stressors after thisperiod are). Alternatively, these effects may be attribut-able to the total accumulation of negative experiences(those who spent longer than six months in institutions

      Call back to the The Bucharest Early Intervention Project! They point out how (even though the study was useful and informative), you cannot really isolate if both early deprivation or total deprivation were the reason for the negative outcomes observed.

    4. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      The study of sensitive periods inemotion development is often applied in an overly broad way,rather than in terms of the different components that consti-tute emotion processing.

      The authors are pointing out how trying to ask "is there a critical period for development" is too broad of a question because it is a highly complex system like language. Instead it might be more useful to study discrete processes within socioemotional development (e.g. fear conditioning, reward processing,).

    5. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      There is now ample evidencethat perturbations in caregiving or extreme levels ofadversity have cascading effects on many aspects ofchildren’s socio-emotional development. But evidencethat adversity is associated with heightened risk of nega-tive outcomes is not sufficient in and of itself to claim thatthe behavioral sequalae of these effects resulted from asensitive period.

      Here again the authors identify what past researchers have done in observing how early adversity can lead to poor outcomes and correlating that with a critical period. But correlation between timing and outcome is not the same as a developmental window causing the outcome.

    6. Sybella.ss 18 May 2026
      An argument in support of a sensitive period must dem-onstrate that input during particular developmental

      The authors in this paper are making a distinction between simply showing that early experiences matter versus showing that the timing of these experiences influence the outcome which is critical when trying to define a critical period.

    Annotators