Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/27962
Title: | Combining wearable fNIRS and immersive virtual reality to study preschoolers’ social development: a proof-of-principle study on preschoolers’ social preference |
Authors: | Bulgarelli, C Pinti, P Aburumman, N Jones, EJH |
Keywords: | social preference;naturalistic neuroscience;toddlerhood;fNIRS;functional connectivity;immersive virtual-reality |
Issue Date: | 15-Dec-2023 |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Citation: | Bulgarelli, C. et al. (2023) 'Combining wearable fNIRS and immersive virtual reality to study preschoolers’ social development: a proof-of-principle study on preschoolers’ social preference', Oxford Open Neuroscience, 2, pp. 1 - 15. doi: 10.1093/oons/kvad012. |
Abstract: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. A child’s social world is complex and rich, but has traditionally been assessed with conventional experiments where children are presented with repeated stimuli on a screen. These assessments are impoverished relative to the dynamics of social interactions in real life, and can be challenging to implement with preschoolers, who struggle to comply with strict lab rules. The current work meets the need to develop new platforms to assess preschoolers’ social development, by presenting a unique virtual-reality set-up combined with wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). As a proof-of-principle, we validated this platform by measuring brain activity during self-guided social interaction in 3-to-5-year-olds, which is under-investigated, yet crucial to understand the basis of social interactions in preschoolers. 37 preschoolers chose an interaction partner from one of 4 human-like avatars of different gender and age. We recorded spontaneous brain fluctuations from the frontal and temporoparietal regions (notably engaged in social-categorization and preference) while children played a bubble-popping game with a preferred and an assigned avatar. 60% of the participants chose to play with the same-gender and same-age avatar. However, this result was driven by females (>80% vs. 50% in males). Different fronto-temporoparietal connectivity patterns when playing with the two avatars were observed, especially in females. We showed the feasibility of using a novel set-up to naturalistically assess social preference in preschoolers, which was assessed at the behavioural and functional connectivity level. This work provides a first proof-of-principle for using cutting-edge technologies and naturalistic experiments to study social development, opening new avenues of research. |
Description: | Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Supplementary data is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/oons/article/doi/10.1093/oons/kvad012/7475300?login=false#433457515 . |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/27962 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1093/oons/kvad012 |
ISSN: | 2753-149X |
Other Identifiers: | ORCiD ID: Chiara Bulgarelli https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6153-137X ORCiD ID: Nadine Aburumman https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4578-8738 ORCiD ID: Emily J Jones https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5747-9540 kvad012 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Computer Science Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
---|---|---|---|---|
FullText.pdf | Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | 2.3 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License