Characterizing developmental changes in infant habituation using functional change point detection
Samuel Beaton1, Samantha McCann1, Sarah Lloyd-Fox2
1King's College London, Department of Women & Children's Health, London, United Kingdom.
Neurophotonics
|August 14, 2026
Summary
Functional change point detection reveals age-related differences in infant habituation timing. Older infants show earlier decreases in hemodynamic response, indicating a developmental shift in cognitive processing during the first year of life.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Habituation, a cognitive process linked to learning, is typically studied using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) by analyzing changes in hemodynamic response amplitude.
- Conventional fNIRS analyses often assume linear time-invariance, potentially missing dynamic changes in responses during repeated stimulus presentations, especially in developing infants.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the utility of functional change point (FCPt) detection for characterizing trial-specific infant hemodynamic responses.
- To determine if FCPt detection can reveal developmental differences in the timing of habituation during infancy.
Main Methods:
- Applied FCPt detection with wild binary segmentation to group-level infant fNIRS data (n=204) from rural Gambia.
- Data were collected from infants at 5, 8, and 12 months of age during a habituation and novelty detection paradigm.
- Functional data analysis (FDA) was used, treating entire response curves as statistical objects to identify significant shifts in mean response across trials.
Main Results:
- Significant changes in hemodynamic responses were identified in auditory cortical regions.
- A high proportion of detected change points indicated decreasing response magnitudes at 8 and 12 months of age.
- Weighted ordinal regression showed an age-related shift, with older infants exhibiting earlier detection of decreasing change points within the trial sequence.
Conclusions:
- FCPt detection offers valuable temporal information on infant hemodynamic responses, surpassing conventional analysis limitations.
- Group-level analysis revealed a significant age-related difference in habituation timing within the first year of life, with older infants habituating more rapidly.
- This study highlights a previously unrecognized developmental change in the habituation response, suggesting earlier maturation of cognitive processing in older infants.
