DOI: 10.60641/08qs-ce26
title: EEG Coherence

description: YOUth is a large-scale longitudinal cohort study following children from the city of Utrecht and its surrounding areas in their development from pregnancy until early adulthood. The YOUth cohort focuses on neurocognitive development involved in two core characteristics of behavioral development: social competence and behavioral control. YOUth includes children from the general population to cover the whole range of variation in behavioral development, ranging from uncomplicated development, through problem behavior, to psychiatric disorders. To understand why some children develop problematic behavior, and others show resilience, YOUth measures a broad range of biological, child-related and environmental determinants.

YOUth conducts repeated measurements at regular intervals (i.e. 'waves'). Specifically, the study has two inclusion moments: YOUth Baby & Child and YOUth Child & Adolescent. YOUth applies a flexible longitudinal design to the cohorts, meaning that children are measured at broader age ranges (3-year age ranges) at each wave. The main benefit of the flexible age design is that it provides more detailed information on the neurodevelopmental curves over time.

An extensive data set is generated, including 3D-ultrasound sweeps of the fetal brain, eye tracking, EEG, (f)MRI, computer tasks, cognitive measurements and parent-child observations. We also collect a broad range of questionnaires on behavior, personality, health, lifestyle, parenting, child development, use of (social) media and more. Finally, (umbilical) blood samples, buccal swabs, saliva and hair samples are collected at each visit, and stored in the UMC Utrecht Biobank.
description: In the EEG Cohorence task, young children passively watch 60-second video clips depicting singing women (created by Sabine Hunnius and colleagues) or moving toys (used earlier by Jones et al., 2015) while Electrocardiography (EEG) is measured. The task lasts approximately 6 minutes, where both sets of videos last 60 seconds.
description: Continuous EEG was recorded using a 32-channel ActiveTwo BioSemi system (Amsterdam, Netherlands), configured to the standard International 10-20 System (channels: 28 lateral channels FP1/2; F7/8; F3/4; AF3/4; FC1/2, FC5/6, C3/4, T7/8, CP1/2, CP5/6, P3/4, P7/8, O1/2, PO3/4, plus 4 midline channels Fz, Cz, Pz, Oz). For some children, an additional eye-electrode was placed behind the child’s left eye (Ex3), and/or additional loose electrodes were positioned at the mastoids (Ex1-2). Electrodes offset were less than 20μv. The EEG data were recorded relative to common mode sense and driven right leg (CMS/DRL) electrodes placed near Cz. Continuous EEG was acquired at a 2048Hz sample rate using Actiview (version 7.05) from a Dell latitude E5540 laptop (operating system Windows 10 Professional; in lab 0.41 version details: i5-4310U CPU @ 2,00 GHz 2,60GHz 8GB; in lab 0.42, version details: i3-4010U CPU @ 1,70 GHz 1,70GHz 4GB). Tasks were programmed in Matlab using Psych-Toolbox 3 (Brainard & Vision, 1997) from a second laptop (MacBookPro 11,1 13 inch retina OSX 10.9.5 Intel Core i7 2,8 GHz 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3).