Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks

Wijeakumar, Sobanawartiny; Forbes, Samuel H.; Magnotta, Vincent A.; Deoni, Sean; Jackson, Kiara; Singh, Vinay P.; Tiwari, Madhuri; Kumar, Aarti; Spencer, John P.

doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01725-3

Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks

Wijeakumar, Sobanawartiny; Forbes, Samuel H.; Magnotta, Vincent A.; Deoni, Sean; Jackson, Kiara; Singh, Vinay P.; Tiwari, Madhuri; Kumar, Aarti; Spencer, John P.

Authors

Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar

Dr Samuel Forbes samuel.forbes@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Vincent A. Magnotta

Sean Deoni

Kiara Jackson

Vinay P. Singh

Madhuri Tiwari

Aarti Kumar

John P. Spencer

Abstract

Stunting is associated with poor long-term cognitive, academic and economic outcomes, yet the mechanisms through which stunting impacts cognition in early development remain unknown. In a first-ever neuroimaging study conducted on infants from rural India, we demonstrate that stunting impacts a critical, early-developing cognitive system—visual working memory. Stunted infants showed poor visual working memory performance and were easily distractible. Poor performance was associated with reduced engagement of the left anterior intraparietal sulcus, a region involved in visual working memory maintenance and greater suppression in the right temporoparietal junction, a region involved in attentional shifting. When assessed one year later, stunted infants had lower problem-solving scores, while infants of normal height with greater left anterior intraparietal sulcus activation showed higher problem-solving scores. Finally, short-for-age infants with poor physical growth indices but good visual working memory performance showed more positive outcomes suggesting that intervention efforts should focus on improving working memory and reducing distractibility in infancy.

Citation

Wijeakumar, S., Forbes, S. H., Magnotta, V. A., Deoni, S., Jackson, K., Singh, V. P., …Spencer, J. P. (2023). Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks. Nature Human Behaviour, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01725-3

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Sep 13, 2023
Online Publication Date	Oct 26, 2023
Publication Date	2023
Deposit Date	Nov 6, 2023
Publicly Available Date	Nov 6, 2023
Journal	Nature Human Behaviour
Publisher	Nature Research
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01725-3
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1898658

Files

Published Journal Article (Advance Online Version) (4.9 Mb)
PDF

Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.