Baseline EEG in the first year of life: insights into the development of autism spectrum disorder and language impairments

The dataset includes power values obtained from baseline EEG recorded in infants. Specifically, for each infant the Power Spectral Density (PSD) was estimated for epochs of 30 s (at least 2 epochs) using the Welch’s method (Hamming window of 10s with 50% overlap) and successively log transformed as follow: log PSD = log10(1+PSD). The power in the following bands was computed: delta (2-4 Hz), theta (4-6 Hz), low-alpha (6-9-Hz), high-alpha (9-13 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz) and gamma (30-45 Hz).  Two clusters of 6 frontal electrodes were selected (frontal left cluster and frontal right cluster) and power values were then averaged across electrodes within each cluster. Thus, the database contains for each subjects and frequency band two values of power one related to the frontal left cluster and the other one related to frontal right cluster.

Each raw in the database corresponds to a subject and each column to a different variable.

Column A,  Subject code;

Column B,  Group: 0 = typically developing (TD) infant; 1 = infant higher likelihood of developing language and learning impairments (HL-LLI); 2 = infant at higher likelihood of developing autism spectrum disorder (HL-ASD);

Column C, Diagnosis_group: 0 = children from the original TD group (without familiarity for neither ASD nor LLI) who at 3 years of age scored above the 30th percentile in the parent-administered Language Development Survey (LDS) (Rescorla and Alley, 2001); 1 = children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorders/Developmental Dyslexia (DLD/DD); 2 = children diagnosed with ASD;

Column D, Time_point: 1 = data related to the EEG recording performed at six months of age; 2 = data related to the EEG recording performed at twelve months of age;

Columns from E to P: power values obtained in the frontal left (F_sx) and right (F_dx) clusters for each frequency band.

All details about subjects, groups, data acquisition and preprocessing are available in the following manuscript: Piazza, C., Dondena, C., Riboldi, E. M., Riva, V., & Cantiani, C. (2023). Baseline EEG in the first year of life: Preliminary insights into the development of autism spectrum disorder and language impairments. iScience, 26(7).

Matlab .m files related to the preprocessing steps and the power value extraction are also available.