Presentation Flashcards
(15 cards)
Slide 1
Good afternoon. In the final weeks before birth, the fetal brain is rapidly developing—but are the foundations of social cognition already emerging? FETAL-MIND will ask whether socially relevant stimuli can already be perceived by the fetus before birth.
Slide 2
This project explores questions such as 1) Can the fetus detect conspecific vocal and visual cues? 2) Can we measure cortical responses to social stimuli in the womb? And crucially, 3) Does prenatal social perception predict postnatal social development? These questions will be addressed through five work packages.
Slide 3 [picture of two fetuses]
Here we’re asking how much the fetus already knows even before it’s born. To date, there’s not much direct evidence to address this question, with work providing at best indirect evidence from newborn infants. FETAL-MIND might show that rather than being a blank slate, the third trimester fetus is already hard-wired to recognizes faces and voices, with the precursors of social cognition already in place. To be clear, I’m NOT interested in prenatal learning – I’m interested in what the fetus already knows!
Slide 4 [picture of one fetus]
FETAL-MIND will draw on highly unique stimuli, including face-like light patterns and audio clips of human voices, which have never been thoroughly studied with fetal MEG. Does the fetus respond to these stimuli? Here in Tübingen, I am uniquely positioned to address this question. The Tuebingen fMEG Center is the only site in Europe equipped with both current-generation and next-generation fetal MEG technology, allowing us to not only detect fetal brain responses but also ensure these findings can be replicated worldwide.
Slide 5 [artwork]
1) This project will tap into the age-old “nature versus nurture” debate. 2) If I demonstrate that the fetuses already prefers these stimuli over control stimuli with similar low-level features, then the project may take us toward a paradigm shift, away from a model of the fetus that comes into the world as a blank slate, and toward … 3) a model of the fetus that is hard wired to detect conspecific cues before birth.
Slide 6 [stimuli]
I’ll now elaborate more on the stimuli in the context of the MEG experiments. FETAL-MIND targets the two fundamental markers of human identity: faces and voices.
Slide 7 [auditory stimuli]
Slide 8 [visual stimuli]
Slide 9 [WP1]
Work Package 1 estimates effect sizes. We’ll measure how fetal brains respond to voices and face-like patterns, hypothesizing moderate effect sizes that correlate with gestational age and head circumference. This pilot data will inform power calculations for the remaining work packages.
Slide 10 [WP2]
Work Package 2 validates these findings in a larger sample. Using both event related fields and frequency-tagging approaches, we’ll test whether social stimuli consistently evoke neural responses. I also hypothesize that neural complexity will diminish in response to social stimuli, building on prior work I published last year in Nature Mental Health for fetal auditory evoked responses.
Slide 11 [WP3]
Work Package 3 examines whole-body responses. If fetuses truly attend to social stimuli, we should also observe physiological changes beyond neural activity. We’ll measure heart rate deceleration—an established marker of attention in infants—predicting that social stimuli will evoke cardiac responses that correlate with maturational markers. The fetal heart signal is easily detected using the same hardware used for fetal MEG.
Slide 12 [WP4]
Next, our unique technological capabilities at the Tuebingen fetal MEG Center make Work Package 4 possible, which will makes this possible. Tübingen houses both generations of fetal MEG technology: traditional SQUID-MEG, available at only one other site worldwide, and newer OPM-MEG—non-cryogenic, flexible, and one-tenth the cost. This dual capability allows us to validate findings across both technologies, ensuring future replicability at other sites with access to OPM-MEG. [say something about hypothesis]
Slide 13 [WP5]
Work Package 5 provides the critical developmental link. We’ll follow our subjects after birth, examining, for instance, whether fetal responses to face-like patterns with infant responses to real faces. This longitudinal approach will demonstrate whether prenatal social stimuli genuinely predict postnatal social perception, while also mapping hemispheric lateralization patterns in infants.
Slide 14 [Progress update]
Some progress since the written proposal: I have my first senior author manuscript currently under review at PLOS Complex Systems, which highlights my supervision and independence credentials. And I have a preprint manuscript, under review at Current Biology, showing fetal MEG frequency tagging in 75 fetuses from two studies previously conducted here in Tübingen. This underscores the feasibility of the frequency tagging approach FETAL-MIND will employ.
Slide 15 [Closing]
In closing, consider this: the European Space Agency spend billions exploring the cosmos, searching for signs of life and intelligence in space—yet the most remarkable intelligence that we know of begins its journey right here. If we invested even a fraction of our space exploration budget into understanding the fetal mind, we would unlock discoveries that could transform how we understand human development, cognition, and the very origins of who we are.
FETAL-MIND represents the first steps into this new world, using cutting-edge technology to discover whether the foundations of social cognition—our ability to recognize faces and voices—are already in place before birth.
