Understanding light in the late term human fetus: Proof of concept for social research techniques

Recently it has been determined that a human fetus lives in an environment which is not dark. This joint project between Lancaster and Durham Universities, seeks to understand how human fetuses respond to aspects of the world related to social information. The aim of this project is to send light to the fetus. Within that light, we will present shapes which are face-like in shape. A human fetus will have never seen a face before. When a baby is first born, she will look at faces more than any other form of visual stimulus. We are aiming to understand if this is something that is learned quickly after birth, or if human genes mean that we look at faces more than anything else. If there is a genetic basis for this behavior, we will find that fetuses will look at a face-like stimulus more when we present it in an upright orientation when compared to showing this to them upside down.

Before we do this, we need to first understand how light moves through skin, muscle and fat. We want the light to be the same for all fetuses, which means we need to create a device that can take into account these factors for every individual mother and fetus.
Investigating how human fetuses understand things before they are born will tell us about the relationship between early learning and the environment. This work may also tell us how the understanding of social information related to other people changes in early development.

This project has potential impacts and benefits related to our understanding of early learning. This has implications for our understanding of the development of different forms of developmental disorders that have a social deficit, such as autism. This is because the ability to process aspects of social information is often impaired in those diagnosed with autism. Therefore, in order to map the parameters of autism, we first need to understand how these systems work in typically developing populations, including the role of the environment for early learning and what babies prefer to look at.

Who will Benefit from this Research?
The primary target audience of this research will be academics who focus on developmental psychology. Other groups which may benefit from this research are the wider community, particularly pregnant women and new mothers. The final group who will benefit from this research are clinicians in obstetrics.

How will They Benefit from this Research?
Traditionally, academics focussing on fetal development have had little engagement with academics who focus on postnatal development. This work will directly link these two research groups and bridge this divide. This work will show how these methods can resolve issues that confront infancy researchers. The wider community also has a substantial interest in research involving our understanding of early development.

The question of the development of fetal orientation to a light source representing a schematized face is of interest both theoretically and practically to the wider community. We expect the results of this study to be of interest to pregnant women especially as increased understanding of late term fetal development is actively linked to early bonding and prosocial dyadic attachment mechanisms.

This work may also have interest for clinicians in obstetrics and gynaecology as well as radiographers. The techniques to be used to measure facial expressions and other forms of fetal behaviour, such as orientation of stimuli, are reasonably well mapped. These have not, to date, been applied to experimental scenarios which have involved 4d-2d measures. The rationale for selecting these measures, together with the technical aspects of how these data have been collected, is likely to generate interest from the clinical perspective.