Neuroscience Ireland Conference 2025
Conference Speaker Profile
Prof. Gerard O’Keeffe
School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Talk Title
Characterising the longitudinal development of intrinsic timescales in the infant brain and how they relate to the alpha brain rhythm
Talk Abstract
The human brain integrates information over time at distinct intrinsic timescales (ITS), and in adults the individual patterns of ITS relate to cognitive scores, severity of ASD symptoms, and the state of consciousness. Our earlier fMRI work showed that neonates already exhibit structured ITS, but they are longer and their distribution across brain areas differ from adults.
To understand the developmental trajectory of ITS and rule out the possible confounding effects of sleep or age-related hemodynamic characteristics in the fMRI data, we measured ITS in a longitudinal cohort of awake infants (6, 9, and 16 months) using resting-state EEG. ITS decreased with age and matched adult values by 9 months, though spatial patterns remained distinct. We also found ITS correlated with features of alpha rhythms: negatively with burst amplitude at 6 months and positively with lagged coherence across all ages.
These results replicate and extend our prior findings showing brain timescales are longer earlier in life and relate to features of brain rhythms. Since meaningful patterns of information appear on different timescales, understanding the neural mechanisms underlying time integration in the infant brain will allow us to devise well-controlled experiments investigating how infants learn from a forever changing and extremely complex stream of information
Speaker Biography
I’m a developmental cognitive neuroscientist exploring how both infant and caregiver brains develop during the early years of life, with a focus on social development and neurodiversity. I use a mix of behavioural observation, cognitive testing, fMRI, EEG, and computational modelling to investigate these questions.
After graduating summa cum laude in Psychology-Neuroscience from the University of Trento, I completed a PhD in Cognitive Science between Trento and the RIKEN Centre for Brain Science (Japan), studying how genes and environments shape early caregiver-infant interactions in humans and primates. I then joined Trinity College Dublin as a postdoc on the FOUNDCOG project, where we led the first large-scale, longitudinal fMRI study of awake infants at 2 and 9 months—achieving the highest international success rates to date.
In 2024, I became Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Neuroscience) at Queen’s University Belfast. I’m also deeply committed to science communication, making research accessible and impactful beyond academia.