The processing of social stimuli in early infancy

Kinematic observation reduces effect of aging on episodic memory performance

This study investigated the influence of kinematics observation (i.e., observing action from only the motion of the main joints of an actor) on episodic memory performance differences between young and older adults. To this end, 42 young (20-35 years) and 45 older (60-75 years) participants performed a free recall task in two different conditions: either after an encoding phase consisting of the visual presentation and reading of action verbs or after an encoding phase consisting of the visual presentation and naming of point-light displays of humans performing the same actions. Results showed a beneficial effect of point-light display encoding for both young and older participants but with a more pronounced benefit for the older participants compared to young adults. These findings are discussed in relation to the embodied view of memory which considers that memory is directly linked to the sensorimotor experiences and the environmental support hypothesis which postulates that elaborate processing can improve memory performance. In conclusion, kinematic observation could constitute an interesting potential intervention for supporting memory in older adults.

Valproic acid exposure affects social visual lateralization and asymmetric gene expression in zebrafish larvae

Cerebral asymmetry is critical for typical brain function and development; at the same time, altered brain lateralization seems to be associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. Zebrafish are increasingly emerging as model species to study brain lateralization, using asymmetric development of the habenula, a phylogenetically old brain structure associated with social and emotional processing, to investigate the relationship between brain asymmetry and social behavior. We exposed 5-h post-fertilization zebrafish embryos to valproic acid (VPA), a compound used to model the core signs of ASD in many vertebrate species, and assessed social interaction, visual lateralization and gene expression in the thalamus and the telencephalon. VPA-exposed zebrafish exhibit social deficits and a deconstruction of social visual laterality to the mirror. We also observe changes in the asymmetric expression of the epithalamic marker leftover and in the size of the dorsolateral part of the habenula in adult zebrafish. Our data indicate that VPA exposure neutralizes the animals' visual field bias, with a complete loss of the left-eye use bias in front of their own mirror image, and alters brain asymmetric gene expression and morphology, opening new perspectives to investigate brain lateralization and its link to atypical social cognitive development.

Recognition of humans from biological motion in infants

Infant studies have suggested that the detection of biological motion (BM) might be an innate capacity, based on newborns' spontaneous preference for BM. However, it is unclear if, like adults, infants recognize humans from BM and are able to build the representation of bodies and faces. To address this issue, we tested whether exposure to BM influences subsequent face recognition in 3- to 8-month-old infants. After familiarization with a point-light walker (PLW) of either a female or a male, the infant's preference for female and male faces was measured. If infants can build the representation of not only the body but also the face from PLWs, the familiarization effect of gender induced by the PLW might be generalized to faces. We found that infants at 7 to 8 months looked for longer at the face whose gender was opposite to that of the PLW, whereas 3- to 4- and 5- to 6-month-old infants did not. These results suggest that infants can access the representation of humans from BM and extract gender, which is shared across bodies and faces, from at least 7 to 8 months of age.

Social zebrafish: Danio rerio as an emerging model in social neuroendocrinology

The fitness benefits of social life depend on the ability of animals to affiliate with others and form groups, on dominance hierarchies within groups that determine resource distribution, and on cognitive capacities for recognition, learning and information transfer. The evolution of these phenotypes is coupled with that of neuroendocrine mechanisms, but the causal link between the two remains underexplored. Growing evidence from our research group and others demonstrates that the tools available in zebrafish, Danio rerio, can markedly facilitate progress in this field. Here, we review this evidence and provide a synthesis of the state-of-the-art in this model system. We discuss the involvement of generalized motivation and cognitive components, neuroplasticity and functional connectivity across social decision-making brain areas, and how these are modulated chiefly by the oxytocin-vasopressin neuroendocrine system, but also by reward-pathway monoamine signaling and the effects of sex-hormones and stress physiology.

Infant visual preference for the mother's face and longitudinal associations with emotional reactivity in the first year of life

Past research has focused on infants' visual preference for the mother's face, however it is still unknown how these responses change over time and what factors associate with such changes. A longitudinal study (N ~ 60) was conducted to investigate the trajectories of infant visual preference for the mother's face and how these are related to the development of emotional reactivity in the first year of life. Two face stimuli (i.e., the infant's mother and a consistent stranger face) were used in a visual preference task at 2 weeks, 4, 6, and 9 months of age. At each time point, mothers were asked to complete a measure of infant temperament via standardised questionnaires. Our results show that while at 2 weeks, 4 months and 9 months of age infants looked equally at both faces, infants at 6 months looked significantly longer at their mother's face. We also observed prospective associations with emotional reactivity variables so that infants who looked longer at the mother's face at 6 months showed higher falling reactivity, i.e. a better ability to recover from distress, at 9 months. We discuss these findings in light of the roles that both infant development and the caregiver play in emerging emotion regulation capacities during the first year of life.

Perceiving animacy from kinematics: visual specification of life-likeness in simple geometric patterns

Since the seminal work of Heider and Simmel, and Michotte's research, many studies have shown that, under appropriate conditions, displays of simple geometric shapes elicit rich and vivid impressions of animacy and intentionality. The main purpose of this review is to emphasize the close relationship between kinematics and perceived animacy by showing which specific motion cues and spatiotemporal patterns automatically trigger visual perceptions of animacy and intentionality. The animacy phenomenon has been demonstrated to be rather fast, automatic, irresistible, and highly stimulus-driven. Moreover, there is growing evidence that animacy attributions, although usually associated with higher-level cognition and long-term memory, may reflect highly specialized visual processes that have evolved to support adaptive behaviors critical for survival. The hypothesis of a life-detector hardwired in the perceptual system is also supported by recent studies in early development and animal cognition, as well as by the issue of the "irresistibility" criterion, i.e., the persistence of animacy perception in adulthood even in the face of conflicting background knowledge. Finally, further support for the hypothesis that animacy is processed in the earliest stages of vision comes from recent experimental evidence on the interaction of animacy with other visual processes, such as visuomotor performance, visual memory, and speed estimation. Summarizing, the ability to detect animacy in all its nuances may be related to the visual system's sensitivity to those changes in kinematics - considered as a multifactorial relational system - that are associated with the presence of living beings, as opposed to the natural, inert behavior of physically constrained, form-invariant objects, or even mutually independent moving agents. This broad predisposition would allow the observer not only to identify the presence of animates and to distinguish them from inanimate, but also to quickly grasp their psychological, emotional, and social characteristics.

Postnatal women's breastfeeding beliefs, practices, and support during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional comparative study across five countries

Background

Women with COVID-19 experienced numerous concerns and doubts about the safety of breastfeeding their babies, and lack of support may have impacted breastfeeding practices. This study aims to compare breastfeeding beliefs, practices, and contact with healthcare professionals regarding the level of postnatal feeding support provided during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Methods

A multi-country cross-sectional study was conducted with postnatal women in five countries. Women up to six months postpartum were invited to complete an online survey concerning the transmission of preventative measures, beliefs toward breastfeeding, infant feeding practices in the last 24 hours and experiences of postnatal infant feeding support between July to November 2021. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed to identify the association.

Results

Of the 3,253 eligible responses received, 39.5% of children were aged between one and two months, but in Taiwan (36%) and South Korea (42.8%) they were between three and four months. The mean of the belief score was significantly different among countries (p < 0.0001). Women in Brazil and the UK had a higher rate of breastfeeding at the breast (90.7% and 85.4%, respectively) compared to the three Asian countries (p < 0.0001) while feeding with expressed breastmilk in Thailand (59.9%), Taiwan (52.6%), and South Korea (50.4%) was higher than the others (p < 0.0001). Brazil and UK mothers (mean = 16.0 and 14.5 respectively) had a higher mean score for belief toward breastfeeding during the COVID-19 than the others. These results are inversely associated with breastfeeding but positively related to formula feeding practice. Postnatal feeding support during the COVID-19 pandemic was mainly provided by healthcare professionals (67.1%) and peers / family through face-to-face personal contact (51.6%) in all countries.

Conclusion

Some differences were found in breastfeeding beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Asian countries. A positive breastfeeding belief was associated with the practice of breastfeeding at the breast. Women from all countries received postpartum infant feeding support from health professionals and peers / family through personal contacts. Governments need to emphasize and disseminate the importance of breastfeeding safety, especially in Asian countries.

Congenitally blind adults can learn to identify face-shapes via auditory sensory substitution and successfully generalize some of the learned features

Unlike sighted individuals, congenitally blind individuals have little to no experience with face shapes. Instead, they rely on non-shape cues, such as voices, to perform character identification. The extent to which face-shape perception can be learned in adulthood via a different sensory modality (i.e., not vision) remains poorly explored. We used a visual-to-auditory Sensory Substitution Device (SSD) that enables conversion of visual images to the auditory modality while preserving their visual characteristics. Expert SSD users were systematically taught to identify cartoon faces via audition. Following a tailored training program lasting ~ 12 h, congenitally blind participants successfully identified six trained faces with high accuracy. Furthermore, they effectively generalized their identification to the untrained, inverted orientation of the learned faces. Finally, after completing the extensive 12-h training program, participants learned six new faces within 2 additional hours of training, suggesting internalization of face-identification processes. Our results document for the first time that facial features can be processed through audition, even in the absence of visual experience across the lifespan. Overall, these findings have important implications for both non-visual object recognition and visual rehabilitation practices and prompt the study of the neural processes underlying auditory face perception in the absence of vision.

When it pays off to take a look: Infants learn to follow an object's motion with their gaze-Especially if it features eyes

Social cues and instrumental learning are two aspects potentially fostering early gaze following. We systematically investigated the influence of social features (schematic eyes vs. reverse-contrast eyes) and gaze-contingent reinforcement (elicited vs. not elicited) on 4-month-olds' learning to attend to gaze-cued objects. In 4 experiments, we tested infants' (N = 74) gaze following of a turning block with schematic or reverse-contrast eyes. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants could elicit an attractive animation in a training phase via interactive eye tracking by following the turning of the block. Experiments 3 and 4 were yoked controls without contingent reinforcement. Infants did not spontaneously follow the motion of the block. Four-month-olds always followed the block after training when it featured schematic eyes. When the block featured reverse-contrast eyes, the training phase only affected infants' looking behavior without reinforcement. While speaking to a certain degree of plasticity, findings stress the importance of eyes for guiding infants' attention.

Comparison of Visual Fixation Trajectories in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development: A Markov Chain Model

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in which visual attention and visual search strategies are altered. Eye-tracking paradigms have been used to detect these changes. In our study, 18 toddlers with ASD and 18 toddlers with typical development (TD; age range 12-36 months) underwent an eye-tracking paradigm where a face was shown together with a series of objects. Eye gaze was coded according to three areas of interest (AOIs) indicating where the toddlers' gaze was directed: 'Face', 'Object', and 'No-stimulus fixation'. The fixation sequence for the ASD and TD groups was modelled with a Markov chain model, obtaining transition probabilities between AOIs. Our results indicate that the transition between AOIs could differentiate between toddlers with ASD or TD, highlighting different visual exploration patterns between the groups. The sequence of exploration is strictly conditioned based on previous fixations, among which 'No-stimulus fixation' has a critical role in differentiating the two groups. Furthermore, our analyses underline difficulties of individuals with ASD to engage in stimulus exploration. These results could improve clinical and interventional practice by considering this dimension among the evaluation process.

Posterior brain sensorimotor recruitment for inhibition of delayed responses in children

Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress irrelevant thoughts or actions, is central to cognitive and social development. Protracted maturation of frontal brain networks has been reported as a major restraint for this ability, yet, young children, when motivated, successfully inhibit delayed responses. A better understanding of the age-dependent neural inhibitory mechanism operating during the awaiting-to-respond window in children may elucidate this conundrum. We recorded ERPs from children and parental adults to a visual-spatial working memory task with delayed responses. Cortical activation elicited during the first 1000 ms of the awaiting-to-respond window showed, as predicted by prior studies, early inhibitory effects in prefrontal ERPs (P200, 160-260 ms) associated with top-down attentional-biasing, and later effects in parietal/occipital ERPs (P300, 270-650 ms) associated with selective inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli/responses and recurrent memory retrieval. Children successfully inhibited delayed responses and performed with a high level of accuracy (often over 90%), although, the prefrontal P200 displayed reduced amplitude and uniformly delayed peak latency, suggesting low efficacy of top-down attentional-biasing. P300, however, with no significant age-contrasts in latency was markedly elevated in children over the occipital/inferior parietal regions, with effects stronger in younger children. These results provide developmental evidence supporting the sensorimotor recruitment model of visual-spatial working memory relying on the occipital/parietal regions of the early maturing dorsal-visual network. The evidence is in line with the concept of age-dependent variability in the recruitment of cognitive inhibitory networks, complementing the former predominant focus on frontal lobes.

Visual Neuropsychology in Development: Anatomo-Functional Brain Mechanisms of Action/Perception Binding in Health and Disease

Vision is the main entrance for environmental input to the human brain. Even if vision is our most used sensory modality, its importance is not limited to environmental exploration. Rather it has strong links to motor competences, further extending to cognitive and social aspects of human life. These multifaceted relationships are particularly important in developmental age and become dramatically evident in presence of complex deficits originating from visual aberrancies. The present review summarizes the available neuropsychological evidence on the development of visual competences, with a particular focus on the associated visuo-motor integration skills in health and disease. With the aim of supporting future research and interventional settings, the goal of the present review is to constitute a solid base to help the translation of neuropsychological hypotheses into straightforward empirical investigations and rehabilitation/training protocols. This approach will further increase the impact, ameliorate the acceptance, and ease the use and implementation of lab-derived intervention protocols in real-life situations.

Neural mechanisms of visual sensitive periods in humans

Sensitive periods in brain development are phases of enhanced susceptibility to experience. Here we discuss research from human and non-human neuroscience studies which have demonstrated a) differences in the way infants vs. adults learn; b) how the brain adapts to atypical conditions, in particular a congenital vs. a late onset blindness (sensitive periods for atypical brain development); and c) the extent to which neural systems are capable of acquiring a typical brain organization after sight restoration following a congenital vs. late phase of pattern vision deprivation (sensitive periods for typical brain development). By integrating these three lines of research, we propose neural mechanisms characteristic of sensitive periods vs. adult neuroplasticity and learning.

Social Cognitive Dysfunction in Elderly Patients After Anesthesia and Surgery

Extensive studies have revealed that cognitive processing was impaired after anesthesia and surgery, particularly for the elderly patients. However, most of the existing studies focused on the general cognitive deficits (e.g., delayed neuro-cognitive recovery and POCD). Although diagnosis of social abilities has been used in various clinical fields, few studies have investigated the potential deficit on social cognition after anesthesia and surgery. The current study examined whether there was any social cognitive dysfunction after anesthesia and surgery. We achieved this by taking biological motion (BM) as the stimuli of interest, the perception of which has been taken as the hallmark of social cognition. The elderly patients (aged ≥ 60 years) were required to judge whether an upright BM stimulus appeared among the dynamic noises to test their social cognition, as well as do a Mini-Mental State Examination to test their general cognition. The two tests were performed at both 1-day before and 7-day after the surgery. Results showed that 31.25% of patients exhibited BM perception deficit after anesthesia and surgery relative to before anesthesia and surgery, implying that social cognitive dysfunction existed. Meanwhile, social cognitive dysfunction was independent from delayed neurocognitive recovery.

Human and monkey infant attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli

The present study explored behavioral norms for infant social attention in typically developing human and nonhuman primate infants. We examined the normative development of attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli longitudinally in macaques (Macaca mulatta) at 1, 3, and 5 months of age (N = 75) and humans at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 13 months of age (N = 69) using eye tracking. All infants viewed concurrently played silent videos-one social video and one nonsocial video. Both macaque and human infants were faster to look to the social than the nonsocial stimulus, and both species grew faster to orient to the social stimulus with age. Further, macaque infants' social attention increased linearly from 1 to 5 months. In contrast, human infants displayed a nonlinear pattern of social interest, with initially greater attention to the social stimulus, followed by a period of greater interest in the nonsocial stimulus, and then a rise in social interest from 6 to 13 months. Overall, human infants looked longer than macaque infants, suggesting humans have more sustained attention in the first year of life. These findings highlight potential species similarities and differences, and reflect a first step in establishing baseline patterns of early social attention development.

Waist-to-Hip Ratio Sensitivity in Early Infancy

The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is correlated with health and associated with sex, attractiveness, and age judgments by adults. We examined the development of sensitivity to the WHR by testing 3.5-month-old infants' (N = 71) preference between images depicting different WHRs. Female 3.5-month-olds exhibited a preference for the WHR associated with attractiveness and mate value by adults (0.7) over a larger WHR (0.9). This preference was exhibited when infants were tested on upright stimuli but not when they were tested on inverted stimuli, indicating that low-level differences (e.g., curviness) were not driving performance. This sensitivity to WHR may lay the foundation for more explicit preferences and categorical associations later in life. In contrast to females, male infants failed to exhibit a significant preference for the 0.7 WHR in either orientation, replicating previous findings of female infants' superior processing of social stimuli. Implications for theories of the development of body knowledge and sex differences in social information processing are discussed.

Visual development

The developing visual brain is an integrated system, linking analysis of the visual input to visuomotor control, visual cognition, and attention. Major points in human visual development are the presence of rudimentary pathways present at birth which can control fixation behavior, with subsequent development of specific functions. These functions include the emergence of cortical selectivity; the integration of local signals to provide global representations of motion, shape, and space; the development of visuomotor modules for eye movements, manual reaching, and locomotion; and the development of distinct attentional systems. Measures of these processes in infancy and early childhood can provide indicators of broader brain development in the at-risk child. A key system in development is the dorsal cortical stream. Measures of global motion processing, visuomotor actions, and attention suggest that this system is particularly vulnerable in children with a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders. Early disorders of the eye (strabismus, cataract) reveal the level of plasticity in the developing visual system and the ways in which early experience can affect the course of functional development.

Sex-specific scanning in infancy: Developmental changes in the use of face/head and body information

The current investigation sought to differentiate between contrasting perspectives of body knowledge development by determining whether infants' adult-like scanning of male and female bodies is dependent on relevant information from the face/head alone, the body alone, or a combination of both sources. Scanning patterns of 3.5-, 6.5-, and 9-month-olds (N = 80) in response to images that contained information relevant to sex classification in either the face/head or the body were examined. The results indicate that sex-specific scanning in the presence of only one source of relevant information (i.e., face/head or body) is present only at 9 months. Thus, although sex-specific scanning of bodies emerges as early as 3.5 months, information from both faces/heads and bodies is required until sometime between 6.5 and 9 months of age. These findings constrain theories of the development of social perception by documenting the complex interplay between body and face/head processing early in life.

Affective modulation of executive control in early childhood: Evidence from ERPs and a Go/Nogo task

Modulation of adaptive executive control is particularly demanded in a pre- and early-school period. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated whether affective information can influence executive control in preschool children. We have recorded EEG during a Go/Nogo task where gender of a face served as a Go/Nogo cue and emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) were task irrelevant. Negative emotions modulated the magnitude of the conflict effect (Nogo vs. Go) in the N200 relative to neutral control, indicating enhanced cognitive control for negative emotions. Moreover, interpersonal characteristics (e.g., aggressive behavior) correlated with the emotion facilitated inhibitory control as indicated by N200. In addition, Go/Nogo conflict modulated neural responses in children already 100 ms after stimulus onset when paired with socially relevant emotional stimuli. These results show that emotions affect cognitive control in this age group in a valence specific manner.

From automata to animate beings: the scope and limits of attributing socialness to artificial agents

Understanding the mechanisms and consequences of attributing socialness to artificial agents has important implications for how we can use technology to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. Here, we integrate recent findings on the factors that shape behavioral and brain mechanisms that support social interactions between humans and artificial agents. We review how visual features of an agent, as well as knowledge factors within the human observer, shape attributions across dimensions of socialness. We explore how anthropomorphism and dehumanization further influence how we perceive and interact with artificial agents. Based on these findings, we argue that the cognitive reconstruction within the human observer is likely to be far more crucial in shaping our interactions with artificial agents than previously thought, while the artificial agent's visual features are possibly of lesser importance. We combine these findings to provide an integrative theoretical account based on the "like me" hypothesis, and discuss the key role played by the Theory-of-Mind network, especially the temporal parietal junction, in the shift from mechanistic to social attributions. We conclude by highlighting outstanding questions on the impact of long-term interactions with artificial agents on the behavioral and brain mechanisms of attributing socialness to these agents.

A Longitudinal Investigation of Preferential Attention to Biological Motion in 2- to 24-Month-Old Infants

Preferential attention to biological motion is an early-emerging mechanism of adaptive action that plays a critical role in social development. The present study provides a comprehensive longitudinal mapping of developmental change in preferential attention to biological motion in 116 infants at 7 longitudinal time points. Tested repeatedly from 2 until 24 months of age, results reveal that preferential attention to biological motion changes considerably during the first months of life. Previously reported preferences in both neonates and older infants are absent in the second month but do reemerge by month 3 and become increasingly pronounced during the subsequent two years. These results highlight the second month of life as a potentially critical transition period in social visual engagement.

Visual scanning of male and female bodies in infancy

This study addressed the development of attention to information that is socially relevant to adults by examining infants' (N=64) scanning patterns of male and female bodies. Infants exhibited systematic attention to regions associated with sex-related scanning by adults, with 3.5- and 6.5-month-olds looking longer at the torsos of females than of males and looking longer at the legs of males than of females. However, this pattern of looking was not found when infants were tested on headless bodies in Experiment 2, suggesting that infants' differential gaze pattern in Experiment 1 was not due to low-level stimulus features, such as clothing, and also indicating that facial/head information is necessary for infants to exhibit sex-specific scanning. We discuss implications for models of face and body knowledge development.

Development of body emotion perception in infancy: From discrimination to recognition

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is unknown whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life.

Neonatal Imitation: Theory, Experimental Design, and Significance for the Field of Social Cognition

Neonatal imitation has rich implications for neuroscience, developmental psychology, and social cognition, but there is little consensus about this phenomenon. The primary empirical question, whether or not neonatal imitation exists, is not settled. Is it possible to give a balanced evaluation of the theories and methodologies at stake so as to facilitate real progress with respect to the primary empirical question? In this paper, we address this question. We present the operational definition of differential imitation and discuss why it is important to keep it in mind. The operational definition indicates that neonatal imitation may not look like prototypical imitation and sets non-obvious requirements on what can count as evidence for imitation. We also examine the principal explanations for the extant findings and argue that two theories, the arousal hypothesis and the Association by Similarity Theory, which interprets neonatal imitation as differential induction of spontaneous behavior through similarity, offer better explanations than the others. With respect to methodology, we investigate what experimental design can best provide evidence for imitation, focusing on how differential induction may be maximized and detected. Finally, we discuss the significance of neonatal imitation for the field of social cognition. Specifically, we propose links with theories of social interaction and direct social perception. Overall, our goals are to help clarify the complex theoretical issues at stake and suggest fruitful guidelines for empirical research.

Choosing the negative: A behavioral demonstration of morbid curiosity

This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity.

The functional architecture of mother-infant communication, and the development of infant social expressiveness in the first two months

By two-three months, infants show active social expressions during face-to-face interactions. These interactions are important, as they provide the foundation for later emotional regulation and cognition, but little is known about how infant social expressiveness develops. We considered two different accounts. One emphasizes the contingency of parental responsiveness, regardless of its form; the other, the functional architecture account, emphasizes the preparedness of both infants and parents to respond in specific ways to particular forms of behaviour in their partner. We videotaped mother-infant interactions from one to nine weeks, and analysed them with a micro-analytic coding scheme. Infant social expressiveness increased through the nine-week period, particularly after 3 weeks. This development was unrelated to the extent of maternal contingent responsiveness, even to infant social expressions. By contrast, specific forms of response that mothers used preferentially for infant social expressions-mirroring, marking with a smile- predicted the increase in these infant behaviours over time. These results support a functional architecture account of the perceptual and behavioural predispositions of infants and parents that allow young infants to capitalize on relatively limited exposure to specific parental behaviours, in order to develop important social capacities.

Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: a positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly being conceptualized as a spectrum disorder of connectome development. We review evidence suggesting that ASD is characterized by a positive feedback loop that amplifies small functional variations in early-developing sensory-processing pathways into structural and functional imbalances in the global neuronal workspace. Using vision as an example, we discuss how early functional variants in visual processing may be feedback-amplified to produce variant object categories and disrupted top-down expectations, atypically large expectation-to-perception mismatches, problems re-identifying individual people and objects, socially inappropriate, generally aversive emotional responses and disrupted sensory-motor coordination. Viewing ASD in terms of feedback amplification of small functional variants allows a number of recent models of ASD to be integrated with neuroanatomical, neurofunctional and genetic data.

Perceptual learning and face processing in infancy

Configural information (spacing between features) contributes to face-processing expertise in adulthood. We examined whether infants can be "trained" to process this information. In Experiment 1, 3.5-month-olds failed to discriminate changes in the spacing between facial features. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, infants processed the same information after being primed with faces in which the spacing was repeatedly altered. Experiment 4 found that priming was not effective with inverted faces or with faces depicting changes in features but not relations among features, indicating that the priming exhibited in Experiments 2 and 3 was specific to upright faces depicting spacing changes. Thus, even young infants who do not readily process facial configural information can be induced to do so through priming. These findings suggest that learning to encode critical structural information contributes to the development of face processing expertise.

Difference in Visual Social Predispositions Between Newborns at Low- and High-risk for Autism

Some key behavioural traits of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been hypothesized to be due to impairments in the early activation of subcortical orienting mechanisms, which in typical development bias newborns to orient to relevant social visual stimuli. A challenge to testing this hypothesis is that autism is usually not diagnosed until a child is at least 3 years old. Here, we circumvented this difficulty by studying for the very first time, the predispositions to pay attention to social stimuli in newborns with a high familial risk of autism. Results showed that visual preferences to social stimuli strikingly differed between high-risk and low-risk newborns. Significant predictors for high-risk newborns were obtained and an accurate biomarker was identified. The results revealed early behavioural characteristics of newborns with familial risk for ASD, allowing for a prospective approach to the emergence of autism in early infancy.

The Development of Body Structure Knowledge in Infancy

Although we know much about the development of face processing, we know considerably less about the development of body knowledge-despite bodies also being significant sources of social information. One set of studies indicated that body structure knowledge is poor during the 1st year of life and spawned a model that posits that, unlike the development of face knowledge, which benefits from innate propensities and dedicated learning mechanisms, the development of body knowledge relies on general learning mechanisms and develops slowly. In this article, we review studies on infants' knowledge about the structure of bodies and their processing of gender and emotion that paint a different picture. Although questions remain, a general social cognition system likely engenders similar trajectories of development of knowledge about faces and bodies, and may equip developing infants with the capacity to obtain socially critical information from many sources.

A comparison of form processing involved in the perception of biological and nonbiological movements

Although there is evidence for specialization in the human brain for processing biological motion per se, few studies have directly examined the specialization of form processing in biological motion perception. The current study was designed to systematically compare form processing in perception of biological (human walkers) to nonbiological (rotating squares) stimuli. Dynamic form-based stimuli were constructed with conflicting form cues (position and orientation), such that the objects were perceived to be moving ambiguously in two directions at once. In Experiment 1, we used the classification image technique to examine how local form cues are integrated across space and time in a bottom-up manner. By comparing with a Bayesian observer model that embodies generic principles of form analysis (e.g., template matching) and integrates form information according to cue reliability, we found that human observers employ domain-general processes to recognize both human actions and nonbiological object movements. Experiments 2 and 3 found differential top-down effects of spatial context on perception of biological and nonbiological forms. When a background does not involve social information, observers are biased to perceive foreground object movements in the direction opposite to surrounding motion. However, when a background involves social cues, such as a crowd of similar objects, perception is biased toward the same direction as the crowd for biological walking stimuli, but not for rotating nonbiological stimuli. The model provided an accurate account of top-down modulations by adjusting the prior probabilities associated with the internal templates, demonstrating the power and flexibility of the Bayesian approach for visual form perception.

Early Social Experience Affects Neural Activity to Affiliative Facial Gestures in Newborn Nonhuman Primates

A fundamental issue in cognitive neuroscience is how the brain encodes the actions and intentions of others. The discovery of an action-production-perception mechanism underpinning such a capacity advanced our knowledge of how these processes occur; however, no study has examined how the early postnatal environment may shape action-production-perception. Here, we examined the effects of social experience on action-production-perception in 3-day-old rhesus macaques that were raised either with or without their biological mothers. We measured the neonatal imitation skills and brain electrical activity responses, while infants produced and observed facial gestures. We hypothesized that early social experiences may shape brain activity, as assessed via electroencephalogram suppression in the α band (5-7 Hz in infants, known as the mu rhythm) during action observation, and lead to more proficient imitation skills. Consistent with this hypothesis, the infants reared by their mothers were more likely to imitate lipsmacking (LS) - a natural, affiliative gesture - and exhibited greater mu rhythm desynchronization while viewing LS gestures than the nursery-reared infants. These effects were not found in response to tongue protrusion, a meaningless gesture, or a nonsocial control. These data suggest that socially enriched early experiences in the first days after birth increase brain sensitivity to socially relevant actions. © 2015 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Perception of social interactions for spatially scrambled biological motion

It is vitally important for humans to detect living creatures in the environment and to analyze their behavior to facilitate action understanding and high-level social inference. The current study employed naturalistic point-light animations to examine the ability of human observers to spontaneously identify and discriminate socially interactive behaviors between two human agents. Specifically, we investigated the importance of global body form, intrinsic joint movements, extrinsic whole-body movements, and critically, the congruency between intrinsic and extrinsic motions. Motion congruency is hypothesized to be particularly important because of the constraint it imposes on naturalistic action due to the inherent causal relationship between limb movements and whole body motion. Using a free response paradigm in Experiment 1, we discovered that many naïve observers (55%) spontaneously attributed animate and/or social traits to spatially-scrambled displays of interpersonal interaction. Total stimulus motion energy was strongly correlated with the likelihood that an observer would attribute animate/social traits, as opposed to physical/mechanical traits, to the scrambled dot stimuli. In Experiment 2, we found that participants could identify interactions between spatially-scrambled displays of human dance as long as congruency was maintained between intrinsic/extrinsic movements. Violating the motion congruency constraint resulted in chance discrimination performance for the spatially-scrambled displays. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that scrambled point-light dancing animations violating this constraint were also rated as significantly less interactive than animations with congruent intrinsic/extrinsic motion. These results demonstrate the importance of intrinsic/extrinsic motion congruency for biological motion analysis, and support a theoretical framework in which early visual filters help to detect animate agents in the environment based on several fundamental constraints. Only after satisfying these basic constraints could stimuli be evaluated for high-level social content. In this way, we posit that perceptual animacy may serve as a gateway to higher-level processes that support action understanding and social inference.

Motion, identity and the bias toward agency

The well-documented human bias toward agency as a cause and therefore an explanation of observed events is typically attributed to evolutionary selection for a "social brain". Based on a review of developmental and adult behavioral and neurocognitive data, it is argued that the bias toward agency is a result of the default human solution, developed during infancy, to the computational requirements of object re-identification over gaps in observation of more than a few seconds. If this model is correct, overriding the bias toward agency to construct mechanistic explanations of observed events requires structure-mapping inferences, implemented by the pre-motor action planning system, that replace agents with mechanisms as causes of unobserved changes in contextual or featural properties of objects. Experiments that would test this model are discussed.

Impairments in facial affect recognition associated with autism spectrum disorders: a meta-analysis

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by social impairments, including inappropriate responses to affective stimuli and nonverbal cues, which may extend to poor face-emotion recognition. However, the results of empirical studies of face-emotion recognition in individuals with ASD have yielded inconsistent findings that occlude understanding the role of face-emotion recognition deficits in the development of ASD. The goal of this meta-analysis was to address three as-yet unanswered questions. Are ASDs associated with consistent face-emotion recognition deficits? Do deficits generalize across multiple emotional expressions or are they limited to specific emotions? Do age or cognitive intelligence affect the magnitude of identified deficits? The results indicate that ASDs are associated with face-emotion recognition deficits across multiple expressions and that the magnitude of these deficits increases with age and cannot be accounted for by intelligence. These findings suggest that, whereas neurodevelopmental processes and social experience produce improvements in general face-emotion recognition abilities over time during typical development, children with ASD may experience disruptions in these processes, which suggested distributed functional impairment in the neural architecture that subserves face-emotion processing, an effect with downstream developmental consequences.

Neural correlates of apparent motion perception of impoverished facial stimuli: a comparison of ERP and ERSP activity

Our brains readily decode human movements, as shown by neural responses to face and body motion. N170 event-related potentials (ERPs) are earlier and larger to mouth opening movements relative to closing in both line-drawn and natural faces, and gaze aversions relative to direct gaze in natural faces (Puce and Perrett, 2003; Puce et al., 2000). Here we extended this work by recording both ERP and oscillatory EEG activity (event-related spectral perturbations, ERSPs) to line-drawn faces depicting eye and mouth movements (Eyes: Direct vs Away; Mouth: Closed vs Open) and non-face motion controls. Neural activity was measured in 2 occipito-temporal clusters of 9 electrodes, one in each hemisphere. Mouth opening generated larger N170s than mouth closing, replicating earlier work. Eye motion elicited robust N170s that did not differ between gaze conditions. Control condition differences were seen, and generated the largest N170. ERSP difference plots across conditions in the occipito-temporal electrode clusters (Eyes: Direct vs Away; Mouth: Closed vs Open) showed statistically significant differences in beta and gamma bands for gaze direction changes and mouth opening at similar post-stimulus times and frequencies. In contrast, control stimuli showed activity in the gamma band with a completely different time profile and hemispheric distribution to facial stimuli. ERSP plots were generated in two 9 electrode clusters centered on central sites, C3 and C4. In the left cluster for all stimulus conditions, broadband beta suppression persisted from about 250ms post-motion onset. In the right cluster, beta suppression was seen for control conditions only. Statistically significant differences between conditions were confined between 4 and 15Hz, unlike the occipito-temporal sites where differences occurred at much higher frequencies (high beta/gamma). Our data indicate that N170 amplitude is sensitive to the amount of movement in the visual field, independent of stimulus type. In contrast, occipito-temporal beta and gamma activity differentiates between facial and non-facial motion. Context and stimulus configuration likely plays a role in shaping neural responses, based on comparisons of the current data to previously reported studies. Broadband suppression of central beta activity, and significant low frequency differences were likely stimulus driven and not contingent on behavioral responses.

A unified coding strategy for processing faces and voices

Both faces and voices are rich in socially-relevant information, which humans are remarkably adept at extracting, including a person's identity, age, gender, affective state, personality, etc. Here, we review accumulating evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies which suggest that the cognitive and neural processing mechanisms engaged by perceiving faces or voices are highly similar, despite the very different nature of their sensory input. The similarity between the two mechanisms likely facilitates the multi-modal integration of facial and vocal information during everyday social interactions. These findings emphasize a parsimonious principle of cerebral organization, where similar computational problems in different modalities are solved using similar solutions.

Development of human visual function

By 1985 newly devised behavioral and electrophysiological techniques had been used to track development of infants' acuity, contrast sensitivity and binocularity, and for clinical evaluation of developing visual function. This review focus on advances in the development and assessment of infant vision in the following 25 years. Infants' visual cortical function has been studied through selectivity for orientation, directional motion and binocular disparity, and the control of subcortical oculomotor mechanisms in fixation shifts and optokinetic nystagmus, leading to a model of increasing cortical dominance over subcortical pathways. Neonatal face processing remains a challenge for this model. Recent research has focused on development of integrative processing (hyperacuity, texture segmentation, and sensitivity to global form and motion coherence) in extra-striate visual areas, including signatures of dorsal and ventral stream processing. Asynchronies in development of these two streams may be related to their differential vulnerability in both acquired and genetic disorders. New methods and approaches to clinical disorders are reviewed, in particular the increasing focus on paediatric neurology as well as ophthalmology. Visual measures in early infancy in high-risk children are allowing measures not only of existing deficits in infancy but prediction of later visual and cognitive outcome. Work with early cataract and later recovery from blinding disorders has thrown new light on the plasticity of the visual system and its limitations. The review concludes with a forward look to future opportunities provided by studies of development post infancy, new imaging and eye tracking methods, and sampling infants' visual ecology.