Unraveling variability in young children’s brain responses to varied sensory stimulations

Early childhood is a sensitive period of development, marked by high between and within individual variability in the acquisition of cognitive and social abilities. Our aim was to characterize electrophysiological individual sensory profiles of young children with electroencephalography. We recorded visual, auditory, and somesthetic event-related potentials (ERPs) to low-level, complex, and social sensory stimulations in 23 children (13 girls) without neurodevelopmental disorders (mean age: 47.8 months (±10.5) [30 64]). For each participant and condition, we analyzed ERPs' peak amplitudes and latencies and inter-trial consistency (ITC) as a measure of intra-individual variability. A hierarchical cluster analysis, following a principal-component analysis including all ERP measures, revealed 3 clusters; cluster separation was explained by mean ITC level. Neither age nor sensory-cognitive profiles explained cluster membership. Neurophysiological sensory profiles of young children differ mainly according to visual and auditory processing of complex information and do not rely solely on chronological age.