Associations Between Maternal Anxiety, Infant Attention and Amygdala Development in the First Three Years of Life

Abstract

The overarching aim of this dissertation was to better understand how socially salient information biases rapid visual orienting in infants and toddlers, and if this bias is associated with other early correlates of later anxiety diagnoses, including infant temperament, maternal anxiety, and amygdala volume. This study represents an important contribution to the literature focused on early development of attention biases and their associations with later anxiety, especially as it incorporates measures of neurodevelopment, caregiver psychopathology, and infant temperament to better understand overlapping and interacting risk factors for later-emerging anxiety. Both aims primarily utilize a sample of data from the Baby Connectome Project, taking advantage of accelerated longitudinal sampling to characterize attention orienting and amygdala development in the first three years of life. Aim 1 decomposed traditional measures of attention orienting bias into two separate measures (attention facilitation and orienting cost) to more precisely examine how socially salient stimuli such as fearful faces relate to vigilance and orienting in early development, and how visual competition may moderate these biases. Associations between early correlates of anxiety (infant temperament and maternal anxiety) and orienting biases were also examined. Findings indicated some unexpected associations, mainly reduced biases in infants with more anxious temperaments, and in infants with higher-anxiety mothers. Findings also highlighted the degree to which stimuli in “competition with” (i.e., co-presented with) fearful stimuli can moderate orienting biases for infants with and without early risk factors for attention biases and anxiety. Aim 2 examined if and how attention orienting biases (attention facilitation and orienting cost), infant temperament, and maternal anxiety were reflected in right amygdala volume development in the first three years of life. Findings revealed that infant mean reaction time (but not attention biases scores) was associated with right amygdala volumes, such that infants with slower reaction times showed more rapid amygdala volume growth. Additionally, infant and toddler temperament were associated with larger right amygdala volumes over the 0- to 3-year period. These findings highlight very early associations between temperamental risk factors for later anxiety and altered neurodevelopment in regions associated with later anxiety. Taken together, these findings suggest that early risk factors for anxiety (especially infant temperament) have early-emerging associations with biased attention orienting and atypical neurodevelopment. Future studies are needed to extend these findings by examining possible complimentary effects in the right visual hemifield, investigating attention orienting biases in later developmental periods, and further elucidating possible associations between infant attention orienting biases and amygdala resting-state functional connectivity.