New Perspectives on Early Human Development from the Prenatal Period

Abstract

The explosion of synapse formation between neurons in the nervous system (“synaptogenesis”) occurs during the fetal period. Synapses grow at a remarkable rate during the early years of life, while excess connections begin to be cut back. This latter process is called “pruning.” During pruning, seldom-used connections are lost and the brain becomes more precisely organized. This process is particularly important during an individual's critical period of life. According to this view, different extrauterine experiences in the perinatal period may be closely related to later difficulties in cognitive, language, and emotional development. Our recent findings have shown that preterm infants at a term-equivalent age and full-term newborns actually follow different trajectories in neural information processing. We discuss the possibility that such early neural alternations in maturation among preterm infants could be related to later difficulties in social-cognitive development.