Abstract

Infants and children in low- and middle-income countries are frequently exposed to a range of poverty-related risk factors, increasing their likelihood of poor neurodevelopmental outcomes. There is a need for culturally objective markers, which can be used to study infants from birth, thereby enabling early identification and ultimately intervention during a critical time of neurodevelopment. In this talk, findings on early memory development will be presented, obtained in infant cohorts in the UK and The Gambia, West Africa. These data were collected as part of the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project, which longitudinally assesses infants in these two settings from birth to two years of age. Our findings indicate that on group level, both habituation and novelty responses are reduced in the Gambian cohort, however with substantial interindividual variance. Individual differences were further associated with infants’ neurobehavioural scores.