Article

The Development of Social Brain Functions in Infancy

May 2015
Psychological Bulletin 141(6)

Source
PubMed

Authors:

University of Virginia

One fundamental question in psychology is what makes humans such intensely social beings. Probing the developmental and neural origins of our social capacities is a way of addressing this question. In the last 10 years the field of social-cognitive development has witnessed a surge in studies using neuroscience methods to elucidate the development of social information processing during infancy. While the use of electroencephalography (EEG)/event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has revealed a great deal about the timing and localization of the cortical processes involved in early social cognition, the principles underpinning the early development of social brain functioning remain largely unexplored. Here I provide a framework that delineates the essential processes implicated in the early development of the social brain. In particular, I argue that the development of social brain functions in infancy is characterized by the following key principles: (a) self-relevance, (b) joint engagement, (c) predictability, (d) categorization, (e) discrimination, and (f) integration. For all of the proposed principles, I provide empirical examples to illustrate when in infancy they emerge. Moreover, I discuss to what extent they are in fact specifically social in nature or share properties with more domain-general developmental principles. Taken together, this article provides a conceptual integration of the existing EEG/ERPs and fNIRS work on infant social brain function and thereby offers the basis for a principle-based approach to studying the neural correlates of early social cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Processing third-party social interactions in the human infant brain

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2022
INFANT BEHAV DEV

The understanding of developing social brain functions during infancy relies on research that has focused on studying how infants engage in first-person social interactions or view individual agents and their actions. Behavioral research suggests that observing and learning from third-party social interactions plays a foundational role in early social and moral development. However, the brain systems involved in observing third-party social interactions during infancy are unknown. The current study tested the hypothesis that brain systems in prefrontal and temporal cortex, previously identified in adults and children, begin to specialize in third-party social interaction processing during infancy. Infants (N = 62), ranging from 6 to 13 months in age, had their brain responses measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while viewing third-party social interactions and two control conditions, infants viewing two individual actions and infants viewing inverted social interactions. The results show that infants preferentially engage brain regions localized within the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex when viewing third-party social interactions. These findings suggest that brain systems processing third-party social interaction begin to develop early in human ontogeny and may thus play a foundational role in supporting the interpretation of and learning from social interactions.

Right STS responses to biological motion in infancy – An fNIRS study using point-light walkers

Article

Nov 2020

Biological motion perception—our capacity to perceive the intrinsic motion of humans and animals—has been implicated as a precursor of social development in infancy. In the adult brain, several biological motion neural correlates have been identified; of particular importance, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS). We present a study, conducted with fNIRS, which measured brain activations in infants’ right posterior temporal region to point-light walkers, a standard stimulus category of biological motion perception studies. Seven-month-old infants (n = 23) participated in a within-subject blocked design with three experimental conditions and one baseline. Infants viewed: an intact upright point-light walker of a person approaching the observer; the same point-light walker stimulus but inverted; and a selected frame from the point-light walker stimulus, approaching the viewer at constant velocity with no articulated motion, close to object motion. We found activations for both the upright and the inverted point-light walkers. The rigid moving point-light walker frame did not elicit any response consistent with a functional activation in this region. Our results suggest that biological motion is processed differently in the right middle posterior temporal cortex in infancy, and that articulated motion is a critical feature in biological motion processing at this early age.

How the therapeutic relationship can repair failures in ‘safe other’ experiences required for normal neurodevelopment of capacities for human intimacy and autonomy

Article

Feb 2020

Dynamic neurodevelopment occurs in the first months of human life and requires optimal environmental conditions to advance in a typical way. One of the most important determinants of this process is the stable availability of a safe and responsive caregiver. This provides the child with a facilitative context for solving naturally emerging developmental conflicts, namely conflicts between the need for intimacy and the need for autonomy. If this availability is provided, the child acquires both affect regulation abilities as well as the capacity for curiosity that leads to an independent exploration of novel environments. The child also develops the ability to mentalize and empathize with others from this context, which serves as a foundation for further satisfactory functioning in both the intrapersonal and interpersonal worlds. Early adversity in the form of restricted access to a responsive caregiver leads to abnormalities in the process of neurodevelopment that result in long-lasting emotional and behavioral problems. These problems can be understood as difficulties in processing experience. In this context, the present article will comment on the qualities of the therapeutic relationship that seem critical in work with people who experience difficulties in this area.

Neonate gut colonization: The rise of a social brain

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2019

Background: The human gut microbiota constitutes an integral part of human physiology, playing an important role in maintaining health, and compositional or functional changes in intestinal microbiota may be associated with the emergence of several chronic diseases. Animal and human studies have shown that there is a dynamic cross-talk between intestinal microorganisms and brain networks which has an impact on neurodevelopment and may be extremely critical in shaping human social behavior. Purpose: The aim of the current review is to appraise and present in a concise manner all findings linking the evolution of neonate and infant gut colonization with early social development and to formulate scientifically informed hypotheses which could guide future research on this field.

Preterm birth and neonatal white matter microstructure in in-vivo reconstructed fiber tracts among audiovisual integration brain regions

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023

Individuals born preterm are at risk of developing a variety of sequelae. Audiovisual integration (AVI) has received little attention despite its facilitating role in the development of socio-cognitive abilities. The present study assessed the association between prematurity and in-vivo reconstructed fiber bundles among brain regions relevant for AVI. We retrieved data from 63 preterm neonates enrolled in the Developing Human Connectome Project (http://www.developingconnectome.org/) and matched them with 63 term-born neonates from the same study by means of propensity score matching. We performed probabilistic tractography, DTI and NODDI analysis on the traced fibers. We found that specific DTI and NODDI metrics are significantly associated with prematurity in neonates matched for postmenstrual age at scan. We investigated the spatial overlap and developmental order of the reconstructed tractograms between preterm and full-term neonates. Permutation-based analysis revealed significant differences in dice similarity coefficients and developmental order between preterm and full term neonates at the group level. Contrarily, no group differences in the amount of interindividual variability of DTI and NODDI metrics were observed. We conclude that microstructural detriment in the reconstructed fiber bundles along with developmental and morphological differences are likely to contribute to disadvantages in AVI in preterm individuals.

Correction to: Epigenetic tuning of brain signal entropy in emergent human social behavior

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2020
BMC MED

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

Epigenetic tuning of brain signal entropy in emergent human social behavior

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2020
BMC MED

Background: How the brain develops accurate models of the external world and generates appropriate behavioral responses is a vital question of widespread multidisciplinary interest. It is increasingly understood that brain signal variability-posited to enhance perception, facilitate flexible cognitive representations, and improve behavioral outcomes-plays an important role in neural and cognitive development. The ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to complex and dynamic social information is particularly critical for the development of adaptive learning and behavior. Social perception relies on oxytocin-regulated neural networks that emerge early in development. Methods: We tested the hypothesis that individual differences in the endogenous oxytocinergic system early in life may influence social behavioral outcomes by regulating variability in brain signaling during social perception. In study 1, 55 infants provided a saliva sample at 5 months of age for analysis of individual differences in the oxytocinergic system and underwent electroencephalography (EEG) while listening to human vocalizations at 8 months of age for the assessment of brain signal variability. Infant behavior was assessed via parental report. In study 2, 60 infants provided a saliva sample and underwent EEG while viewing faces and objects and listening to human speech and water sounds at 4 months of age. Infant behavior was assessed via parental report and eye tracking. Results: We show in two independent infant samples that increased brain signal entropy during social perception is in part explained by an epigenetic modification to the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and accounts for significant individual differences in social behavior in the first year of life. These results are measure-, context-, and modality-specific: entropy, not standard deviation, links OXTR methylation and infant behavior; entropy evoked during social perception specifically explains social behavior only; and only entropy evoked during social auditory perception predicts infant vocalization behavior. Conclusions: Demonstrating these associations in infancy is critical for elucidating the neurobiological mechanisms accounting for individual differences in cognition and behavior relevant to neurodevelopmental disorders. Our results suggest that an epigenetic modification to the oxytocin receptor gene and brain signal entropy are useful indicators of social development and may hold potential diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic value.

Stumbling out of the Gate: The energy‐based implications of morning routine disruption

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021
PERS PSYCHOL

Despite academic and practical advice regarding the virtues of daily routines for effective work performance, such routines are vulnerable to disruption from any number of sources. To understand whether and how routine disruptions affect employees at work, we draw on cognitive energetics theory (CET) and explore the potential negative consequences of morning routine disruptions on employees’ energy allocations at work. Moreover, given that CET is fundamentally a theory of goal attainment, we examine the downstream impact of routine disruptions on employees’ work goal progress. Results from two daily experience‐sampling studies show that when employees’ morning routines were disrupted, employees experienced higher levels of depletion and reduced calmness. In turn, depletion was associated negatively, and calmness was associated positively, with daily work engagement. Finally, daily work engagement was positively related to subsequent daily goal progress. These findings have important implications for our understanding of employees’ morning routines and the ways that disruptions to those routines ripple through employees’ workdays. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

The developmental origins of subliminal face processing

Article

Jul 2020
NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV R

Sensitive responding to facial information is of key importance during human social interactions. Research shows that adults glean much information from another person’s face without conscious perception, attesting to the robustness of face processing in the service of adaptive social functioning. Until recently, it was unclear whether such subliminal face processing is an outcome of extensive learning, resulting in adult face processing skills, or an early defining feature of human face processing. Here, we review recent research examining the early ontogeny and brain correlates of subliminal face processing, demonstrating that subliminal face processing: (1) emerges during the first year of life; (2) is multifaceted in response to transient (gaze, emotion) and stable (trustworthiness) facial cues; (3) systematically elicits frontal brain responses linked to attention allocation. The synthesized research suggests that subliminal face processing emerges early in human development and thus may play a foundational role during human social interactions. This offers a fresh look at the ontogenetic origins of unconscious face processing and informs theoretical accounts of human sociality.

Circuits for social learning: A unified model and application to Autism Spectrum Disorder

Article

Sep 2019
NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV R

Early life social experiences shape neural pathways in infants to develop lifelong social skills. This review presents the first unified circuit-based model of social learning that can be applied to early life social development, drawing together unique human developmental milestones, sensitive learning periods, and behavioral and neural scaffolds. Circuit domains for social learning are identified governing Activation, Integration, Discrimination, Response and Reward (AIDRR) to sculpt and drive human social learning. This unified model can be used to identify social delays earlier in development. We propose social impairments observed in Autism Spectrum Disorder are underpinned by early mistimed sensitive periods in brain development and alterations in amygdala development to disrupt the AIDRR circuits. This model directs how interventions can target neural circuits for social development and be applied early in life. To illustrate, the oxytocin intervention is explored in context of the AIDRR circuits. This model shifts the focus from applying possibly-related broad treatments, to specifying and targeting the relevant circuits, at the right time of development, to optimize social learning.

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2019
Psychol Sci Publ Interest

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

No evidence for discontinuity between infants and adults

Preprint

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Response to: Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.014

Infant and maternal responses to emotional facial expressions: A longitudinal study

Article

Feb 2023

The current longitudinal study (N = 107) examined mothers' facial emotion recognition using reaction time and their infants' affect-based attention at 5, 7, and 14 months of age using eyetracking. Our results, examining maternal and infant responses to angry, fearful and happy facial expressions, show that only maternal responses to angry facial expressions were robustly and positively linked across time points, indexing a consistent trait-like response to social threat among mothers. However, neither maternal responses to happy or fearful facial expressions nor infant responses to all three facial emotions show such consistency, pointing to the changeable nature of facial emotion processing, especially among infants. In general, infants' attention toward negative emotions (i.e., angry and fear) at earlier timepoints was linked to their affect-biased attention for these emotions at 14 months but showed greater dynamic change across time. Moreover, our results provide limited evidence for developmental continuity in processing negative emotions and for the bidirectional interplay of infant affect-biased attention and maternal facial emotion recognition. This pattern of findings suggests that infants' affect-biased attention to facial expressions of emotion are characterized by dynamic changes.

Las TIC en la etapa de educación infantil: una mirada crítica de su uso y reflexiones para las buenas prácticas como alternativa educativa.

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Enrique Alonso-Sainz

Las TIC son herramientas que se nos brindan a nuestro alcance bajo la promesa de una vida mucho más fácil y llevadera. Aunque la apariencia regale a la vista un elemento atractivo, debajo del cristal de la pantalla, se esconden multitud de problemas e inconvenientes en general y para la etapa infantil en particular. Puede convertirse en un Caballo de Troya que es responsabilidad de los educadores y padres conocer antes de permitirle la entrada en nuestras vidas y en las de nuestros hijos y alumnos. Problemas como la adicción, la sobreestimulación, los problemas de atención o la hiperactividad son algunos de los efectos secundarios que puede acarrear un uso indebido de las nuevas tecnologías. El objetivo de este texto es analizar, desde un punto de vista teórico y bibliográfico, los diferentes usos que se dan a las TIC en edad infantil con objetivo formativo, en casa y en la escuela, basando las afirmaciones en estudios ya planteados con anterioridad. Una mirada crítica que desgrane parte de la realidad del uso de tecnologías en ambos ámbitos.

Studying the Developing Brain in Real-World Contexts: Moving From Castles in the Air to Castles on the Ground

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

Most current research in cognitive neuroscience uses standardized non-ecological experiments to study the developing brain. But these approaches do a poor job of mimicking the real-world, and thus can only provide a distorted picture of how cognitive operations and brain development unfold outside of the lab. Here we consider future research avenues which may lead to a better appreciation of how developing brains dynamically interact with a complex real-world environment, and how cognition develops over time. We raise several problems faced by current mainstream methods in the field, before briefly reviewing novel promising approaches that alleviate some of these issues. First, we consider research that examines perception by measuring entrainment between brain activity and temporal patterns in naturalistic stimuli. Second, we consider research that examines our ability to parse our continuous experience into discrete events, and how this ability develops over time. Third, we consider the role of children as active agents in selecting what they sample from the environment from one moment to the next. Fourth, we consider new approaches that measure how mutual influences between children and others are instantiated in suprapersonal brain networks. Finally, we discuss how we may reduce adult biases when designing developmental studies. Together, these approaches have great potential to further our understanding of how the developing brain learns to process information, and to control complex real-world behaviors.

Association of psychosocial adversity and social information processing in children raised in a low-resource setting: a fNIRS study

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Social cognition skills and socioemotional development are compromised in children growing up in low SES contexts, however, the mechanisms underlying this association remain unknown. Exposure to psychosocial risk factors early in life alters the child’s social milieu and in turn, could lead to atypical processing of social stimuli. In this study, we used functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure cortical responses to a social discrimination task in children raised in a low-resource setting at 6, 24, and 36 months. In addition, we assessed the relation between cortical responses to social and non-social information with psychosocial risk factors assessed using the Childhood Psychosocial Adversity Scale (CPAS). In line with previous findings, we observed specialization to social stimuli in cortical regions in all age groups. In addition, we found that risk factors were associated with social discrimination at 24 months (intimate partner violence and verbal abuse and family conflict) and 36 months (verbal abuse and family conflict and maternal depression) but not at 6 months. Overall, the results show that exposure to psychosocial adversity has more impact on social information processing in toddlerhood than earlier in infancy

Caring for Others: The Early Emergence of Sympathy and Guilt

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Humans have evolved to be highly interdependent: We rely heavily on one another to survive and succeed as individuals and as a species. This interdependence has meant, in turn, the need to ensure the well-being of those with whom we are – or could potentially be – interdependent.

Infants Oscillatory Frequencies change during Free-Play

Article

Aug 2021
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Social interactions are known to be an essential component of infant development. For this reason, exploring functional neural activity while infants are engaged in social interactions will enable a better understanding of the infant social brain. This in turn, will enable the beginning of disentangling the neural basis of social and non-social interactions as well as the influence that maternal engagement has on infant brain function. Maternal sensitivity serves as a model for socio-emotional development during infancy, which poses the question: do interactions between parents and their offspring present altered electrophysiological responses in comparison to the general population if said parents are at risk of mental health disorders? The current research aimed to observe the oscillatory activity of 6-month-old infants during spontaneous free-play interactions with their mother. A 5-minute unconstrained free-play session was recorded between infant-mother dyads with EEG recordings taken from the 6-month-old infants (n = 64). During the recording, social and non-social behaviours were coded and EEG assessed with these epochs. Results showed an increase in oscillatory activity both when an infant played independently or interacted with their mother and oscillatory power was greatest in the alpha and theta bands. In the present 6-month-old cohort, no hemispheric power differences were observed as oscillatory power in the corresponding neural regions (i.e. left and right temporal regions) appeared to mirror each other. Instead, temporal estimates were larger and different from all other regions, whilst the frontal and parietal regions bihemispherically displayed similar estimates, which were larger than those observed centrally, but smaller than those displayed in the temporal locations. The interactions observed between the behavioural events and frequency bands demonstrated a significant reduction in power comparative to the power observed in the gamma band during the baseline event. The present research sought to explore the obstacle of artificial play paradigms for neuroscience research, whereby researchers question how much these paradigms relate to reality. The present manuscript will discuss the strengths and limitations of taking an unconstrained free-play approach.

Impaired social attention detected through eye movements in children with early‐onset epilepsy

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2021
EPILEPSIA

Objectives Children with early-onset epilepsy (CWEOE; epilepsy onset before 5 years) exhibit impaired social functioning, but social attention has not yet been examined. In this study we sought to explore visual attention via eye tracking as a component of social attention and examine its relationship with social functioning and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) risk scores. Methods Forty-seven CWEOE (3–63 months) and 41 controls (3–61 months) completed two eye-tracking tasks: (1) preference for social versus nonsocial naturalistic scenes, and (2) face region preference task. ASD risk was measured via the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers or Conners Early Childhood Total Score. Social functioning was assessed via the Greenspan Social-Emotional Growth Chart, or Infant-Toddler Social & Emotional Assessment Competence Scale, or Conners Early Childhood Social Functioning Scale, depending on age. Fixation preferences for social scenes and eyes were compared between groups and evaluated by age and social functioning scores. Results Regression analysis revealed that CWEOE viewed the social scene to a significantly less degree than controls. The greatest difference was found between the youngest CWEOE and controls. Fixation duration was independently and significantly related to social functioning scores. There were no significant differences between CWEOE and controls in the face scanning task, and there was no significant relationship between either task and ASD risk scores. Significance CWEOE exhibit task-specific atypical social attention early in the course of the disease. This may be an early marker of impaired social development, and it suggests abnormal social brain development.

Variability in Infants' Functional Brain Network Connectivity Is Associated With Differences in Affect and Behavior

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2021

Variability in functional brain network connectivity has been linked to individual differences in cognitive, affective, and behavioral traits in adults. However, little is known about the developmental origins of such brain-behavior correlations. The current study examined functional brain network connectivity and its link to behavioral temperament in typically developing newborn and 1-month-old infants (M [age] = 25 days; N = 75) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Specifically, we measured long-range connectivity between cortical regions approximating fronto-parietal, default mode, and homologous-interhemispheric networks. Our results show that connectivity in these functional brain networks varies across infants and maps onto individual differences in behavioral temperament. Specifically, connectivity in the fronto-parietal network was positively associated with regulation and orienting behaviors, whereas connectivity in the default mode network showed the opposite effect on these behaviors. Our analysis also revealed a significant positive association between the homologous-interhemispheric network and infants' negative affect. The current results suggest that variability in long-range intra-hemispheric and cross-hemispheric functional connectivity between frontal, parietal, and temporal cortex is associated with individual differences in affect and behavior. These findings shed new light on the brain origins of individual differences in early-emerging behavioral traits and thus represent a viable novel approach for investigating developmental trajectories in typical and atypical neurodevelopment.

Genetic variation in the oxytocin system and its link to social motivation in human infants

Article

Full-text available

May 2021
PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINO

Frontal brain asymmetry has been linked to motivational processes in infants and adults, with left lateralization reflecting motivation to approach and right lateralization reflecting motivation to withdraw. We examined the hypothesis that variability in infants’ social motivation may be linked to genetic variation in the oxytocin system. Eleven-month-old infants’ brain responses and looking preferences to smiling and frowning individuals were assessed in conjunction with a polymorphism in CD38 (rs3796863) linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and reduced oxytocin. Frontal brain asymmetry and looking preferences differed as a function of CD38 genotype. While non-risk A-allele carriers displayed left lateralization to smiling faces (approach) and a heightened looking preference for the individual who smiled, infants with the CC (ASD risk) genotype displayed withdrawal from smiling faces and a preference for the individual who frowned. Findings demonstrate that the oxytocin system is linked to brain and behavioral markers of social motivation in infancy.

Reciprocity and alignment: Quantifying coupling in dynamic interactions

Article

Full-text available

May 2021

Recent accounts of social cognition focus on how we do things together, suggesting that becoming aligned relies on a reciprocal exchange of information. The next step is to develop richer computational methods that quantify the degree of coupling and describe the nature of the information exchange. We put forward a definition of coupling, comparing it to related terminology and detail, available computational methods and the level of organization to which they pertain, presenting them as a hierarchy from weakest to richest forms of coupling. The rationale is that a temporally coherent link between two dynamical systems at the lowest level of organization sustains mutual adaptation and alignment at the highest level. Postulating that when we do things together, we do so dynamically over time and we argue that to determine and measure instances of true reciprocity in social exchanges is key. Along with this computationally rich definition of coupling, we present challenges for the field to be tackled by a diverse community working towards a dynamic account of social cognition.

Genetic variation in the oxytocin system and its link to social motivation in human infants

Preprint

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Introduction. Variability in the motivation to approach or withdraw from others displayed in infancy is thought to have long-term effects on human social development. Frontal brain asymmetry has been linked to motivational processes in infants and adults, with greater left frontal asymmetry reflecting motivation to approach and greater right frontal asymmetry reflecting motivation to withdraw. We examined the hypothesis that variability in infants’ social motivation is linked to genetic variation in the endogenous oxytocin system. Specifically, we measured infants’ frontal brain asymmetry and later looking preferences to smiling and frowning individuals and assayed a single-nucleotide polymorphism in the CD38 gene (rs3796863) linked to autism spectrum disorder and reduced peripheral oxytocin levels. Methods. 77 11-month-old infants’ (36 female) brain responses were measured via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while viewing four individuals display either smiles or frowns directed toward or away from them. This was followed by a person preference test using eyetracking. Results. Frontal brain asymmetry patterns evoked by direct-gaze faces significantly differed as a function of CD38 genotype. Specifically, while non-risk A-allele carriers displayed greater left lateralization to smiling faces (approach) and greater right lateralization to frowning faces (withdrawal), infants with the CC (ASD risk) genotype displayed withdrawal from smiling faces. During eyetracking, A-allele carriers showed a heightened preference for the individual who smiled, while CC infants preferred the individual who frowned. Conclusions. Our findings demonstrate that, from early in human ontogeny, genetic variation in the oxytocin system is linked to variability in brain and behavioral markers of social motivation.

Correlates and antecedents of theory of mind development during middle childhood and adolescence: An integrated model

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2021

Theory of Mind (ToM) is one of the core abilities that allows children to connect socially with others and to consider others' perspectives. Historically , most research on ToM development has focused on early childhood, but recent years have seen an increased focus on how children build this critical social understanding beyond the preschool timeframe. Given this burgeoning literature, we have identified and organized findings across a variety of domains of development to provide a cohesive theoretical framework depicting the correlates and antecedents of ToM development throughout middle childhood and adolescence. Thus, the present paper provides a synthesis and narrative review of the research to yield insights into important ways in which often-disparate lines of study (e.g., brain specialization, relational aggression, reading comprehension) relate to ToM and bidirectionally influence one another in the developing child. Specifically, we focused our analysis of the literature on identifying neural networks underlying ToM, the roles of executive function and emotional self-regulation on ToM, the socioemotional correlates of ToM, and relations between ToM and academic performance. We also provide a brief discussion of studies recognizing sociocultural, linguistic, and contextual influences on ToM. Our review provides evidence for both common and distinct processes and corollaries with age across these disparate literatures, with significant research indicating the important role of mediating and moderating processes when considering how advanced ToM impacts development. We end by proposing a theoretical, integrative framework and discussing the future directions for the field, including testable predictions generated by the framework that span often-disparate domains of inquiry.

The Development of Emotion Reasoning in Infancy and Early Childhood

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2020

Historically, research characterizing the development of emotion recognition has focused on identifying specific skills and the age periods, or milestones, at which these abilities emerge. However, advances in emotion research raise questions about whether this conceptualization accurately reflects how children learn about, understand, and respond to others' emotions in everyday life. In this review, we propose a developmental framework for the emergence of emotion reasoning-that is, how children develop the ability to make reasonably accurate inferences and predictions about the emotion states of other people. We describe how this framework holds promise for building upon extant research. Our review suggests that use of the term emotion recognition can be misleading and imprecise, with the developmental processes of interest better characterized by the term emotion reasoning. We also highlight how the age at which children succeed on many tasks reflects myriad developmental processes. This new framing of emotional development can open new lines of inquiry about how humans learn to navigate their social worlds.

Building a Face-Space for Social Cognition

Chapter

Oct 2020

Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2020

Forming an impression of another person is an essential aspect of human social cognition linked to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) function in adults. The current study examined the neurodevelopmental origins of impression formation by testing the hypothesis that infants rely on processes localized in mPFC when forming impressions about individuals who appear friendly or threatening. Infants’ brain responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while watching four different face identities displaying either smiles or frowns directed toward or away from them (N = 77). This was followed by a looking preference test for these face identities (now displaying a neutral expression) using eyetracking. Our results show that infants’ mPFC responses distinguish between smiling and frowning faces when directed at them and that these responses predicted their subsequent person preferences. This suggests that the mPFC is involved in impression formation in human infants, attesting to the early ontogenetic emergence of brain systems supporting person perception and adaptive behavior.

Friend or foe? Impression formation in the human infant brain

Preprint

Jul 2020

Forming an impression of another person is an essential aspect of human social cognition linked to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) function in adults. The current study examined the neurodevelopmental origins of impression formation by testing the hypothesis that infants rely on processes localized in mPFC when forming impressions about friendly versus threatening individuals. Infants’ brain responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) while watching four different individuals displaying either smiles or frowns directed toward or away from them (N = 77). This was followed by a person preference test measured by looking behavior using eyetracking. Our results show that infants’ mPFC responses distinguish between friendly and threatening faces when directed at them and that these responses predicted their person preference. This demonstrates that the mPFC is involved in impression formation in human infants, attesting to the early ontogenetic emergence of brain systems supporting person perception and adaptive behavior.

Human and monkey infant attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli

Article

May 2020

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.

Attenuated activation of the anterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex on self-relevant social reward processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2020

The social motivation hypothesis posits that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) find social stimuli less rewarding and are therefore less motivated towards social interaction than people with neuro-typical development (TD). However, the less rewarding social stimuli characteristics during social interaction for people with ASD are largely unknown. The contingent positive responsiveness of others relevant to self-action motivates the early development of social interaction, thus representing a social reward. As individuals with ASD often exhibit atypical responses to self-relevant stimuli in their early life, we hypothesized that the self-relevant responses of others are less rewarding for individuals with ASD. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using a social contingency task. During the task, the participants attempted to make the audience laugh by telling funny jokes and thus activating the anterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex (arMPFC) of TD individuals (Sumiya et al., 2017). We explicitly predicted that the atypical activation of the arMPFC is related to the reduced reward value of self-relevant responses to others in individuals with ASD. Thirty-one adults with ASD and 24 age- and intelligence quotient-matched TD adults participated in the study. Participants with ASD reported significantly lower pleasure after the audience's responses to their own actions than those in the TD group. Correspondingly, the self-related activation of the arMPFC, defined by the results of our previous study, was attenuated in the ASD group compared to the TD group. The present findings indicate that weak self-relevant outcome processing mediated by the arMPFC of individuals with ASD dampens the rewarding nature of social interaction.

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2020

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the "social brain," a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the to-date largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD. Methods: As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits. Results: We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders. Conclusions: Contrary to prior reports, this large-scale study does not support the assumption that altered social brain activation during mentalizing forms a common neural marker of ASD, at least with the paradigm we employed. Yet, autistic individuals show socio-behavioral deficits. Our work therefore highlights the need to interrogate social brain function with other brain measures, such as connectivity and network-based approaches, using other paradigms, or applying complementary analysis approaches to assess individual differences in this heterogeneous condition.

General Anesthetic-Induced Neurotoxicity in the Immature Brain: Reevaluating the Confounding Factors in the Preclinical Studies

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2020
BMRI

General anesthetic (GA) is used clinically to millions of young children each year to facilitate surgical procedures, relieve perioperative stress, and provide analgesia and amnesia. During recent years, there is a growing concern regarding a causal association between early life GA exposure and subsequently long-term neurocognitive abnormalities. To address the increasing concern, mounting preclinical studies and clinical trials have been undergoing. Until now, nearly all of the preclinical findings show that neonatal exposure to GA causally leads to acute neural cell injury and delayed cognitive impairment. Unexpectedly, several influential clinical findings suggest that early life GA exposure, especially brief and single exposure, does not cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcome, which is not fully in line with the experimental findings and data from several previous cohort trials. As the clinical data have been critically discussed in previous reviews, in the present review, we try to analyze the potential factors of the experimental studies that may overestimate the adverse effect of GA on the developing brain. Meanwhile, we briefly summarized the advance in experimental research. Generally, our purpose is to provide some useful suggestions for forthcoming preclinical studies and strengthen the powerfulness of preclinical data.

A decade of infant neuroimaging research: What have we learned and where are we going?

Article

Nov 2019

The past decade has seen the emergence of neuroimaging studies of infant populations. Incorporating imaging has resulted in invaluable insights about neurodevelopment at the start of life. However, little has been enquired of the experimental specifications and study characteristics of typical findings. This review systematically screened empirical studies that used elec-troencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional near-infrared spectro-scopy (fNIRS), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on infants (max. age of 24 months). From more than 21,000 publications, a total of 710 records were included for analyses. With the exception of EEG studies, infant studies with MEG, fNIRS, and fMRI were most often conducted around birth and at 12 months. The vast majority of infant studies came from North America, with very few studies conducted in Africa, certain parts of South America, and Southeast Asia. Finally, longitudinal neuroimaging studies were inclined to adopt EEG, followed by fMRI, fNIRS, and MEG. These results show that there is compelling need for studies with larger sample sizes, studies investigating a broader range of infant developmental periods, and studies from under-and less-developed regions in the world. Addressing these shortcomings in the future will provide a more representative and accurate understanding of neurodevelopment in infancy.

What is social competence? An investigation into the concept among children with antisocial behaviours

Article

Nov 2019

The study investigates child social competence a three different measurement levels (overall level, factor level, and item level), in a sample of parents and children participating in interventions towards emerging or present child problem behaviours. Parents of 550 children aged 3–12 (71% boys) evaluated social competence using the Home and Community Social Behaviour Scales (HCSBS), which assess two aspects of the concept: peer relations and self-management/compliance. An additive index across all 32 items was made to examine how parents reported overall social competence across ages, whereas factor analysis was used to investigate their underlying latent structure. Network analysis was used to investigate how the social competence items connect and interact. Results showed that parents reported higher levels of overall social competence among the girls compared to the boys, but this difference vanished about age 12. Factor analyses showed that a bifactor-ESEM model obtained the best model fit to data, whereas the network analysis revealed differential clustering and strength centrality for the items. Implications of these results are discussed.

Infancy and Early Childhood Development in Children Raised by Foster Parents in Romania

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2017

Flavia Teculeasa

Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction

Article

May 2019
NAT REV NEUROSCI

Although a large proportion of our lives are spent participating in social interactions, the investigation of the neural mechanisms supporting these interactions has largely been restricted to situations of social observation — that is, situations in which an individual observes a social stimulus without opportunity for interaction. In recent years, efforts have been made to develop a truly social, or ‘second-person’, neuroscientific approach to these investigations in which neural processes are examined within the context of a real-time reciprocal social interaction. These developments have helped to elucidate the behavioural and neural mechanisms of social interactions; however, further theoretical and methodological innovations are still needed. Findings to date suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting social interaction differ from those involved in social observation and highlight a role of the so-called ‘mentalizing network’ as important in this distinction. Taking social interaction seriously may also be particularly important for the advancement of the neuroscientific study of different psychiatric conditions. Studies that examine brain activity during real-time social interactions may advance our understanding of human social behaviour. Redcay and Schilbach describe progress in ‘second-person’ neuroscience and discuss the insights into the brain mechanisms of social behaviour that have been gained.

Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor gene is associated with emotion processing in the infant brain

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2019

The neural capacity to discriminate between emotions emerges early in development, though little is known about specific factors that contribute to variability in this vital skill during infancy. In adults, DNA methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTRm) is an epigenetic modification that is variable, predictive of gene expression, and has been linked to autism spectrum disorder and the neural response to social cues. It is unknown whether OXTRm is variable in infants, and whether it is predictive of early social function. Implementing a developmental-neuroimaging-epigenetics approach in a large sample of infants (N = 98), we examined whether OXTRm is associated with neural responses to emotional expressions. OXTRm was assessed at 5 months of age. At 7 months of age, infants viewed happy, angry, and fearful faces while functional near-infrared spectroscopy was recorded. We observed that OXTRm shows considerable variability among infants. Critically, infants with higher OXTRm show enhanced responses to anger and fear and attenuated responses to happiness in right inferior frontal cortex, a region implicated in emotion processing through action-perception coupling. Findings support models emphasizing oxytocin’s role in modulating neural response to emotion and identify OXTRm as an epigenetic mark contributing to early brain function.

Using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy to assess social information processing in poor urban Bangladeshi infants and toddlers

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2019

Children living in low resource settings are at risk for failing to reach their developmental potential. While the behavioral outcomes of growing up in such settings are well‐known, the neural mechanisms underpinning poor outcomes have not been well elucidated, particularly in the context of low‐ and middle‐income countries. In this study, we measure brain metabolic responses to social and non‐social stimuli in a cohort of 6‐ and 36‐month‐old Bangladeshi children. Study participants in both cohorts lived in an urban slum and were exposed to a broad range of adversity early in life including extreme poverty, malnutrition,, recurrent infections, and low maternal education. We observed brain regions that responded selectively to social stimuli in both ages indicating that these specialized brain responses are online from an early age. We additionally show that the magnitude of the socially selective response is related to maternal education, maternal stress, and the caregiving environment. Ultimately our results suggest that a variety of psychosocial hazards have a measurable relationship with the developing social brain. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Infant brain responses to social sounds: A longitudinal functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2019

Infants are responsive to and show a preference for human vocalizations from very early in development. While previous studies have provided a strong foundation of understanding regarding areas of the infant brain that respond preferentially to social vs. non-social sounds, how the infant brain responds to sounds of varying social significance over time, and how this relates to behavior, is less well understood. The current study uniquely examined longitudinal brain responses to social sounds of differing social-communicative value in infants at 3 and 6 months of age using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). At 3 months, infants showed similar patterns of widespread activation in bilateral temporal cortices to communicative and non-communicative human non-speech vocalizations, while by 6 months infants showed more similar, and focal, responses to social sounds that carried increased social value (infant-directed speech and human non-speech communicative sounds). In addition, we found that brain activity at 3 months of age related to later brain activity and receptive language abilities as measured at 6 months. These findings suggest areas of consistency and change in auditory social perception between 3 and 6 months of age.

Modality-independent recruitment of inferior frontal cortex during speech processing in human infants

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2018

Despite increasing interest in the development of audiovisual speech perception in infancy, the underlying mechanisms and neural processes are still only poorly understood. In addition to regions in temporal cortex associated with speech processing and multimodal integration, such as superior temporal sulcus, left inferior frontal cortex (IFC) has been suggested to be critically involved in mapping information from different modalities during speech perception. To further illuminate the role of IFC during infant language learning and speech perception, the current study examined the processing of auditory, visual and audiovisual speech in 6-month-old infants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our results revealed that infants recruit speech-sensitive regions in frontal cortex including IFC regardless of whether they processed unimodal or multimodal speech. We argue that IFC may play an important role in associating multimodal speech information during the early steps of language learning.

Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor gene impacts emotion processing in the human infant brain

Preprint

Oct 2018

The neural capacity to discriminate between emotions emerges early in development, though little is known about specific factors that contribute to variability in this vital skill during infancy. In adults, DNA methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTRm) is an epigenetic modification that is variable, predictive of gene expression, and has been linked to autism spectrum disorder and the neural response to social cues. It is unknown whether OXTRm is variable in infants, and whether it is predictive of early social function. Implementing a developmental-neuroimaging-epigenetics approach in a large sample of infants (N=98), we examined whether OXTRm impacts neural responses to emotional expressions. OXTRm was assessed at 5 months of age. At 7 months of age, we presented infants with happy, angry, and fearful faces while recording functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We observed that OXTRm shows considerable variability among infants. Critically, infants with higher OXTRm, and presumably reduced amount of oxytocin receptor, show enhanced responses to anger and fear and attenuated responses to happiness in right inferior frontal cortex, a region implicated in emotion processing through action-perception coupling. Findings support models emphasizing oxytocin's role in modulating neural response to emotion and identify OXTRm as a biomarker contributing to early brain function.

Development Period of Prefrontal Cortex

Chapter

Full-text available

Oct 2018

Merve Çıkılı Uytun

Ageing brain and geopolitical leadership: a bio-psycho-sociological approach to the fall of Sharif of Mecca Husayn bin Ali, 1908–1924

Article

Aug 2021
INTERDISCIPL SCI REV

Jesús Romero Moñivas

In 1908 Husayn ibn Ali was proclaimed Sharif of Mecca, in 1916 King of Hejaz and in 1924 Caliph. However, that same year he had to abdicate and ended his last years in exile. What happened? The case of Husayn aims to show the importance of an interdisciplinary approach for understanding the political behavior. The aim of this article is to show that complex social environments require a single/multi-selves structure and that this structure is more or less balanced or biased between the two poles depending on the person's age and the type of social environment.

Mutual benefits of an experiential

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2022

Susan Nkhensani Thuketana

49 This paper draws on Kolb's experiential learning theory. Experiential learning can be used to create and verify knowledge or to analyse truths and belief systems. The experiences of third-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) students and the benefits of stakeholder engagement in the delivery of teacher training are highlighted in this paper. Although learners were the focal point of this community engagement project, both in-service and pre-service teachers benefitted in terms of skills transfer and upskilling. Special emphasis was placed on reading comprehension and the effects of the underdevelopment of perceptual skills on learning. The epistemological theoretical insights in this paper contribute to teaching practice, equipping in-service teachers with the skill to link perceptual skills development to learning. The project made use of participatory action research (PAR) underpinned by Kolb's interactive learning cycle of active experimentation, reflective observation, concrete experience and abstract conceptualisation. Two hundred and seventeen (217) student teachers, 20 Foundation Phase teachers and 300 learners from one school participated in this project. The results of this community engagement project revealed that community projects are essential in disseminating theoretical knowledge to in-service teachers, and thus, in sharing learning support strategies for children with special needs.

How Does the Brain Help us Understand Others?

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

What do you think your friends are thinking when they get a compliment? How do they feel when they get a good grade at school? Thinking about other people and what they know, believe, or want is called social cognition. Certain parts of the brain are important for social cognition, and those parts work together in a network to allow us to think about others. How do we develop these social skills, starting as babies? In this article, we will introduce the parts of the brain that are important for social cognition, and we will explain how the network of brain regions that perform social cognition develops over the years, from a new-born baby to an adult.

Trajectories in Developmental Disabilities: Infancy – Childhood – Adolescence

Book

Jan 2022

Emotion words, emotion concepts, and emotional development in children: A constructionist hypothesis

Article

Sep 2019
DEV PSYCHOL

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches-the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism-to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories-by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Probabilistic Learning of Emotion Categories

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2018

Although the configurations of facial muscles that humans perceive vary continuously, we often represent emotions as categories. This suggests that, as in other domains of categorical perception such as speech and color perception, humans become attuned to features of emotion cues that map onto meaningful thresholds for these signals given their environments. However, little is known about the learning processes underlying the representation of these salient social signals. In Experiment 1 we test the role of statistical distributions of facial cues in the maintenance of an emotion category in both children (6–8 years old) and adults (18–22 years old). Children and adults learned the boundary between neutral and angry when provided with explicit feedback (supervised learning). However, after we exposed participants to different statistical distributions of facial cues, they rapidly shifted their category boundaries for each emotion during a testing phase. In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated this finding and also tested the extent to which learners are able to track statistical distributions for multiple actors. Not only did participants form actor-specific categories, but the distributions of facial cues also influenced participants’ trait judgments about the actors. Taken together, these data are consistent with the view that the way humans construe emotion (in this case, anger) is not only flexible, but reflects complex learning about the distributions of the myriad cues individuals experience in their social environments.

Brain Connectivity and Neuroimaging of Social Networks in Autism

Article

Oct 2018
TRENDS COGN SCI

Impairments in social communication (SC) predominate among the core diagnostic features of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Neuroimaging has revealed numerous findings of atypical activity and connectivity of 'social brain’ networks, yet no consensus view on crucial developmental causes of SC deficits has emerged. Aside from methodological challenges, the deeper problem concerns the clinical label of ASD. While genetic studies have not comprehensively explained the causes of nonsyndromic ASDs, they highlight that the clinical label encompasses many etiologically different disorders. The question of how potential causes and etiologies converge onto a comparatively narrow set of SC deficits remains. Only neuroimaging designs searching for subtypes within ASD cohorts (rather than conventional group level designs) can provide translationally informative answers.

Rapid Infant Prefrontal Cortex Development and Sensitivity to Early Environmental Experience

Article

Jun 2018

Amanda S. Hodel

Over the last fifteen years, the emerging field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has described the relatively late development of prefrontal cortex in children and the relation between gradual structural changes and children's protracted development of prefrontal-dependent skills. Widespread recognition by the broader scientific community of the extended development of prefrontal cortex has led to the overwhelming perception of prefrontal cortex as a "late developing" region of the brain. However, despite its supposedly protracted development, multiple lines of research have converged to suggest that prefrontal cortex development may be particularly susceptible to individual differences in children's early environments. Recent studies demonstrate that the impacts of early adverse environments on prefrontal cortex are present very early in development: within the first year of life. This review provides a comprehensive overview of new neuroimaging evidence demonstrating that prefrontal cortex should be characterized as a "rapidly developing" region of the brain, discusses the converging impacts of early adversity on prefrontal circuits, and presents potential mechanisms via which adverse environments shape both concurrent and long-term measures of prefrontal cortex development. Given that environmentally-induced disparities are present in prefrontal cortex development within the first year of life, translational work in intervention and/or prevention science should focus on intervening early in development to take advantages of this early period of rapid prefrontal development and heightened plasticity.

The early development of the brain bases for social cognition

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2013

Much research has focused on how the adult human brain processes social information, yet until recently little was known about the early development of these abilities. This chapter reviews recent work examining the precursors of the human social brain network during infancy in several domains such as face and eye gaze processing, engaging in joint attention, decoding of biological motion, and understanding of human action. The findings from electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) studies in these domains suggest that some brain processes implicated in social cognition in adults become sensitive during infancy. While there seems to be emerging functional specialization for social cognition within individual brain regions during infancy, what still needs to be understood is how these regions become orchestrated into functional networks during development. Thus, in the final section on emerging networks, an account is put forward, based on prefrontal cortex functioning and computational modeling, of how such an integration might be achieved.

The Early Development of Processing Emotions in Face and Voice

Chapter

Full-text available

Jun 2013

Tobias Grossmann

Processing facial and vocal emotional expressions is a critical aspect of person perception. How this ability develops during infancy and what brain processes underpin infants’ perception of emotion in face and voice are the questions dealt with in this chapter. I present a set of new electrophysiological studies that provide insights into the brain processes underlying infants’ developing abilities. Evidence from unimodal (face or voice) and multimodal (face and voice) processing of emotion is considered. The reviewed infant data suggest that (1) early in development, emotion enhances the sensory processing of faces and voices, (2) infants’ ability to allocate increased attentional resources to negative emotional information develops earlier in the vocal domain than in the facial domain, (3) at least by the age of 7 months, infants reliably integrate and recognize emotional information across face and voice. Futhermore, I present some recent work suggesting that already in infancy genetic variation in neurotransmitter systems is associated with individual differences in facial and vocal emotion processing. Finally, I propose new directions for research in this area.

The Social Function of Intellect

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 1976

Nicholas Humphrey

no abstract

Selective Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responses During Live Mutual Gaze Interactions in Human Infants: An fNIRS Study

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2014
BRAIN TOPOGR

To investigate the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in processing multimodal communicative ostensive signals in infants, we measured cerebral hemodynamic responses by using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) during the social interactive play "peek-a-boo", in which both visual (direct gaze) and auditory (infant-directed speech) stimuli were presented. The infants (mean age, around 7 months) sat on their mother's lap, equipped with an NIRS head cap, and looked at a partner's face during "peek-a-boo". An eye-tracking system simultaneously monitored the infants' visual fixation patterns. The results indicate that, when the partner presented a direct gaze, rather than an averted gaze, toward an infant during social play, the infant fixated on the partner's eye region for a longer duration. Furthermore, hemodynamic activity increased more prominently dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in response to social play with a partner's direct gaze compared to an averted gaze. In contrast, hemodynamic activity increased in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (R-lPFC) regardless of a partner's eye gaze direction. These results indicate that a partner's direct gaze shifts an infant's attention to the partner's eyes for interactive communication, and specifically activates the mPFC. The differences in hemodynamic responses between the mPFC and R-lPFC suggest functional differentiation within the PFC, and a specific role of the mPFC in the perception of face-to-face communication, especially in mutual gaze, which is essential for social interaction.

How Joint Is the Joint Attention of Apes and Human Infants?

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2013

In press, Agency and joint attention, H.S. Terrace & J. Metcalfe (Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Travel Broadens the Mind

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2000
INFANCY

The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self-produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad-based and context-specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

Do infants provide evidence that the mirror system is involved in action understanding?

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2013

Victoria Southgate

The mirror neuron theory of action understanding makes predictions concerning how the limited motor repertoire of young infants should impact on their ability to interpret others’ actions. In line with this theory, an increasing body of research has identified a correlation between infants’ abilities to perform an action, and their ability to interpret that action as goal-directed when performed by others. In this paper, I will argue that the infant data does by no means unequivocally support the mirror neuron theory of action understanding and that alternative interpretations of the data should be considered. Furthermore, some of this data can be better interpreted in terms of an alternative view, which holds that the role of the motor system in action perception is more likely to be one of enabling the observer to predict, after a goal has been identified, how that goal will be attained.

Physiological and Behavioral Responses Reveal 9-Month-Old Infants' Sensitivity to Pleasant Touch

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2014
PSYCHOL SCI

Caregiving touch has been shown to be essential for the growth and development of human infants. However, the physiological and behavioral mechanisms that underpin infants' sensitivity to pleasant touch are still poorly understood. In human adults, a subclass of unmyelinated peripheral nerve fibers has been shown to respond preferentially to medium-velocity soft brushing. It has been theorized that this privileged pathway for pleasant touch is used for close affiliative interactions with conspecific individuals, especially between caregivers and infants. To test whether human infants are sensitive to pleasant touch, we examined arousal (heart rate) and attentional engagement (gaze shifts and duration of looks) to varying velocities of brushing (slow, medium, and fast) in 9-month-old infants. Our results provide physiological and behavioral evidence that sensitivity to pleasant touch emerges early in development and therefore plays an important role in regulating human social interactions.

Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2012

Modern theories of the evolution of human cooperation focus mainly on altruism. In contrast, we propose that humans’ species-unique forms of cooperation—as well as their species-unique forms of cognition, communication, and social life—all derive from mutualistic collaboration (with social selection against cheaters). In a first step, humans became obligate collaborative foragers such that individuals were interdependent with one another and so had a direct interest in the well-being of their partners. In this context, they evolved new skills and motivations for collaboration not possessed by other great apes (joint intentionality), and they helped their potential partners (and avoided cheaters). In a second step, these new collaborative skills and motivations were scaled up to group life in general, as modern humans faced competition from other groups. As part of this new group-mindedness, they created cultural conventions, norms, and institutions (all characterized by collective intentionality), with knowledge of a specific set of these marking individuals as members of a particular cultural group. Human cognition and sociality thus became ever more collaborative and altruistic as human individuals became ever more interdependent.

Body Perception in Newborns

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2013

Body ownership and awareness has recently become an active topic of research in adults using paradigms such as the "rubber hand illusion" and "enfacement" [1-11]. These studies show that visual, tactile, postural, and anatomical information all contribute to the sense of body ownership in adults [12]. While some hypothesize body perception from birth [13], others have speculated on the importance of postnatal experience [14, 15]. Through studying body perception in newborns, we can directly investigate the factors involved prior to significant postnatal experience. To address this issue, we measured the looking behavior of newborns presented with visual-tactile synchronous and asynchronous cues, under conditions in which the visual information was either an upright (body-related stimulus; experiment 1) or inverted (non-body-related stimulus; experiment 2) infant face. We found that newborns preferred to look at the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous condition, but only when the visual stimulus was body related. These results are in line with findings from adults and demonstrate that human newborns detect intersensory synchrony when related to their own bodies, consistent with the basic processes underlying body perception being present at birth.

Brain responses reveal young infants' sensitivity to when a social partner follows their gaze

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2013

Infants' ability to follow another person's eye gaze has been studied extensively and is considered to be an important and early emerging social cognitive skill. However, it is not known whether young infants detect when a social partner follows their gaze to an object. This sensitivity might help infants in soliciting information from others and serve as an important basis for social learning. In this study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure 5-month-old infants' frontal and temporal cortex responses during social interactions in which a social partner (virtual agent) either followed the infants' gaze to an object (congruent condition) or looked to an object that the infant had not looked at before (incongruent condition). The fNIRS data revealed that a region in the left prefrontal cortex showed an increased response when compared to baseline during the congruent condition but not during the incongruent condition, suggesting that infants are sensitive to when someone follows their gaze. The findings and their implications for the development of early social cognition are discussed in relation to what is known about the brain processes engaged by adults during these kinds of social interactions.

Infant cortex responds to other humans shortly after birth

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2013

A significant feature of the adult human brain is its ability to selectively process information about conspecifics. Much debate has centred on whether this specialization is primarily a result of phylogenetic adaptation, or whether the brain acquires expertise in processing social stimuli as a result of its being born into an intensely social environment. Here we study the haemodynamic response in cortical areas of newborns (1-5 days old) while they passively viewed dynamic human or mechanical action videos. We observed activation selective to a dynamic face stimulus over bilateral posterior temporal cortex, but no activation in response to a moving human arm. This selective activation to the social stimulus correlated with age in hours over the first few days post partum. Thus, even very limited experience of face-to-face interaction with other humans may be sufficient to elicit social stimulus activation of relevant cortical regions.

Neural Responses to Multimodal Ostensive Signals in 5-Month-Old Infants

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2013
PLOS ONE

Infants' sensitivity to ostensive signals, such as direct eye contact and infant-directed speech, is well documented in the literature. We investigated how infants interpret such signals by assessing common processing mechanisms devoted to them and by measuring neural responses to their compounds. In Experiment 1, we found that ostensive signals from different modalities display overlapping electrophysiological activity in 5-month-old infants, suggesting that these signals share neural processing mechanisms independently of their modality. In Experiment 2, we found that the activation to ostensive signals from different modalities is not additive to each other, but rather reflects the presence of ostension in either stimulus stream. These data support the thesis that ostensive signals obligatorily indicate to young infants that communication is directed to them.

Is There a Social Module? Language, Face Processing, and Theory of Mind in Individuals with Williams Syndrome

Article

Full-text available

Apr 1995

Abstract Many species can respond to the behavior of their conspecifics. Human children, and perhaps some nonhuman primates, also have the capacity to respond to the mental states of their conspecifics, i.e., they have a "theory of mind." On the basis of previous research on the theory-of-mind impairment in people with autism, together with animal models of intentionality, Brothers and Ring (1992) postulated a broad cognitive module whose function is to build representations of other individuals. We evaluate the details of this hypothesis through a series of experiments on language, face processing, and theory of mind carried out with subjects with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorder resulting in an uneven lin-guisticocognitive profile. The results are discussed in terms of how the comparison of different phenotypes (e.g., Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, autism, and hydrocephaly with associated myelomeningocele) can contribute both to understanding the neuropsychology of social cognition and to current thinking about the purported modularity of the brain.

Toward a second-person neuroscience

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2013

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could - paradoxically - be seen as representing the "dark matter" of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies, and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really "go social"; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

Gaze Following in Newborns

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2004
INFANCY

Eye gaze has been shown to be an effective cue for directing attention in adults. Whether this ability operates from birth is unknown. Three experiments were carried out with 2- to 5-day-old newborns. The first experiment replicated the previous finding that newborns are able to discriminate between direct and averted gaze, and extended this finding from real to schematic faces. In Experiments 2 and 3 newborns were faster to make saccades to peripheral targets cued by the direction of eye movement of a central schematic face, but only when the motion of the pupils was visible. These results suggest that newborns may show a rudimentary form of gaze following.

The role of medial prefrontal cortex in early social cognition

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2013
FRONT HUM NEUROSCI

Tobias Grossmann

One major function of our brain is to enable us to behave with respect to socially relevant information. Much research on how the adult human brain processes the social world has shown that there is a network of specific brain areas, also called the social brain, preferentially involved during social cognition. Among the specific brain areas involved in the adult social brain, functional activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC), particularly the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), is of special importance for human social cognition and behavior. However, from a developmental perspective, it has long been thought that PFC is functionally silent during infancy (first year of life), and until recently, little was known about the role of PFC in the early development of social cognition. I shall present an emerging body of recent neuroimaging studies with infants that provide evidence that mPFC exhibits functional activation much earlier than previously thought, suggesting that the mPFC is involved in social information processing from early in life. This review will highlight work examining infant mPFC function across a range of social contexts. The reviewed findings will illustrate that the human brain is fundamentally adapted to develop within a social context.

The Deprived Human Brain

Article

Full-text available

May 2009

Researchers have conducted a study of Romanian institutions, which reveals that institutional life can hinder the normal brain development in young children. Children reared in institutions are characterized by delays in most developmental domains, including physical growth and cognitive, linguistic and emotional development. A group on institutionalized Romanian children with never institutionalized Romanian children is compared in terms of physical growth, cognitive functions, social and emotional development. The study reveals that 100 percent of the attachments of never-institutionalized children are rated as being fully developed and only 3 percent of institutionalized children had fully formed attachments. The children are also screened for Reactive Attachments Disorders (RAD) and institutionalized children of Romania demonstrated significantly higher level of RAD compared to children in never institutionalized groups. The Government of Romania has thereby passed a law forbidding the institutionalization of children younger than two years old unless a child is severely handicapped.

Motor Activation During the Prediction of Nonexecutable Actions in Infants

Article

Full-text available

May 2013
PSYCHOL SCI

Although it is undeniable that the motor system is recruited when people observe others' actions, the inferences that the brain generates from motor activation and the mechanisms involved in the motor system's recruitment are still unknown. Here, we challenged the popular hypothesis that motor involvement in action observation enables the observer to identify and predict an agent's goal by matching observed actions with existing and corresponding motor representations. Using a novel neural indication of action prediction-sensorimotor-cortex activation measured by electroencephalography-we demonstrated that 9-month-old infants recruit their motor system whenever a context suggests an impending action, but that this recruitment is not dependent on being able to match the observed action with a corresponding motor representation. Our data are thus inconsistent with the view that action prediction depends on motor correspondence; instead, they support an alternative view in which motor activation is the result of, rather than the cause of, goal identification.

Intersensory Redundancy Guides the Development of Selective Attention, Perception, and Cognition in Infancy

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2004

That the senses provide overlapping information for objects and events is no extravagance of nature. This overlap facilitates attention to critical aspects of sensory stimulation, those that are redundantly specified, and attenuates attention to nonredundautly specified stimulus properties. This selective attention is most pronounced in infancy and gives initial advantage to the perceptual processing of, learning of, and memory for stimulus properties that are redundant, or amodal (e.g., synchrony, rhythm, and intensity), at the expense of modality-specific properties (e.g., color, pitch, and timbre) that can be perceived through only one sense. We review evidence supporting this hypothesis and discuss its implications for theories of perceptual, cognitive, and social development.

Reduced neural sensitivity to social stimuli in infants at risk for autism

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2013
Proc Biol Sci

In the hope of discovering early markers of autism, attention has recently turned to the study of infants at risk owing to being the younger siblings of children with autism. Because the condition is highly heritable, later-born siblings of diagnosed children are at substantially higher risk for developing autism or the broader autism phenotype than the general population. Currently, there are no strong predictors of autism in early infancy and diagnosis is not reliable until around 3 years of age. Because indicators of brain functioning may be sensitive predictors, and atypical social interactions are characteristic of the syndrome, we examined whether temporal lobe specialization for processing visual and auditory social stimuli during infancy differs in infants at risk. In a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study, infants aged 4-6 months at risk for autism showed less selective neural responses to social stimuli (auditory and visual) than low-risk controls. These group differences could not be attributed to overall levels of attention, developmental stage or chronological age. Our results provide the first demonstration of specific differences in localizable brain function within the first 6 months of life in a group of infants at risk for autism. Further, these differences closely resemble known patterns of neural atypicality in children and adults with autism. Future work will determine whether these differences in infant neural responses to social stimuli predict either later autism or the broader autism phenotype frequently seen in unaffected family members.

An Online Database of Infant Functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy Studies: A Community-Augmented Systematic Review

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2013
PLOS ONE

Until recently, imaging the infant brain was very challenging. Functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a promising, relatively novel technique, whose use is rapidly expanding. As an emergent field, it is particularly important to share methodological knowledge to ensure replicable and robust results. In this paper, we present a community-augmented database which will facilitate precisely this exchange. We tabulated articles and theses reporting empirical fNIRS research carried out on infants below three years of age along several methodological variables. The resulting spreadsheet has been uploaded in a format allowing individuals to continue adding new results, and download the most recent version of the table. Thus, this database is ideal to carry out systematic reviews. We illustrate its academic utility by focusing on the factors affecting three key variables: infant attrition, the reliability of oxygenated and deoxygenated responses, and signal-to-noise ratios. We then discuss strengths and weaknesses of the DBIfNIRS, and conclude by suggesting a set of simple guidelines aimed to facilitate methodological convergence through the standardization of reports.

The history of social cognition

Chapter

Jan 2012

Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception

Book

Jan 2013

This book follows a successful symposium organized in June 2009 at the Human Brain Mapping conference. The topic is at the crossroads of two domains of increasing importance and appeal in the neuroimaging/neuroscience community: multi-modal integration, and social neuroscience. Most of our social interactions involve combining information from both the face and voice of other persons: speech information, but also crucial nonverbal information on the person’s identity and affective state. The cerebral bases of the multimodal integration of speech have been intensively investigated; by contrast only few studies have focused on nonverbal aspects of face-voice integration. This work highlights recent advances in investigations of the behavioral and cerebral bases of face-voice multimodal integration in the context of person perception, focusing on the integration of affective and identity information. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective.

The historical background of modern social psychology

Article

Jan 1954

G. Allport

Joint attention as social cognition

Article

Jan 1995

M. Tomasello

Illuminating the developing brain: the past, present and future of functional near infrared spectroscopy

Article

Feb 2010

A decade has passed since near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was first applied to functional brain imaging in infants. As part of the team that published the first functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) infant study in 1998, we have continued to develop and refine both the technology and methods associated with these measurements. The increasing international interest that this technology is generating among neurodevelopmental researchers and the recent technical developments in biomedical optics have prompted us to compile this review of the challenges that have been overcome in this field, and the practicalities of performing fNIRS in infants. We highlight the increasingly diverse and ambitious studies that have been undertaken and review the technological and methodological advances that have been made in the study design, optical probe development, and interpretation and analyses of the haemodynamic response. A strong emphasis is placed on the potential of the technology and future prospects of fNIRS in the field of developmental neuroscience.

Excerpts from the principles of psychology

Article

Jan 2014

W. James

Subcortical face processing

Article

Jan 2005
NAT REV NEUROSCI

M.H. Johnson

The Development of Multisensory Integration in the Brain

Article

Aug 1997

Mark T Wallace

Multisensory integration in the superior colliculus (SC) of the cat requires a protracted postnatal developmental time course. Kittens 3 – 135 days postnatal (dpn) were examined and the first neuron capable of responding to two different sensory inputs (auditory and somatosensory) was not seen until 12 dpn. Visually responsive multisensory neurons were not encountered until 20 dpn. These early multisensory neurons responded weakly to sensory stimuli, had long response latencies, large receptive fields, and poorly developed response selectivities. Most striking, however, was their inability to integrate cross-modality cues in order to produce the significant response enhancement or depression characteristic of these neurons in adults. The incidence of multisensory neurons increased gradually over the next 10 – 12 weeks. During this period, sensory responses became more robust, latencies shortened, receptive fields decreased in size, and unimodal selectivities matured. The first neurons capable of cross-modality integration were seen at 28 dpn. For the following two months, the incidence of such integrative neurons rose gradually until adult-like values were achieved. Surprisingly, however, as soon as a multisensory neuron exhibited this capacity, most of its integrative features were indistinguishable from those in adults. Given what is known about the requirements for multisensory integration in adult animals, this observation suggests that the appearance of multisensory integration reflects the onset of functional corticotectal inputs.

Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age, monographs of the society for research in child development

Article

Jan 1998

Executive Function in Typical and Atypical Development

Chapter

Nov 2007

IntroductionDefinitional IssuesStructure–Function MappingEF in Typical DevelopmentEF in Atypical DevelopmentConclusion

Impairments of Social and Moral Behavior Related to Early Damage in Human Prefrontal Cortex

Article

Nov 1999

The long-term consequences of early prefrontal cortex lesions occurring before 16 months were investigated in two adults. As is the case when such damage occurs in adulthood, the two early-onset patients had severely impaired social behavior despite normal basic cognitive abilities, and showed insensitivity to future consequences of decisions, defective autonomic responses to punishment contingencies and failure to respond to behavioral interventions. Unlike adult-onset patients, however, the two patients had defective social and moral reasoning, suggesting that the acquisition of complex social conventions and moral rules had been impaired. Thus early-onset prefrontal damage resulted in a syndrome resembling psychopathy.

Nature-Nurture and the Two Realms of Development: A Proposed Integration with Respect to Mental Development

Article

Mar 1981

Robert B. McCall

Hot and Cool Executive Function in Childhood and Adolescence: Development and Plasticity

Article

Dec 2012
CHILD DEV PERSPECT

Executive function (EF), which refers to the more deliberate, top-down neurocognitive processes involved in self-regulation, develops most rapidly during the preschool years, together with the growth of neural networks involving prefrontal cortex but continues to develop well into adulthood. Both EF and the neural systems supporting EF vary as a function of motivational significance, and this article discusses the distinction between the top-down processes that operate in motivationally and emotionally significant situations (“hot EF”) and the top-down processes that operate is more affectively neutral contexts (“cool EF”). Emerging evidence indicates that both hot and cool EF are surprisingly malleable, with implications for intervention and prevention.

Tuning the developing brain to emotional body expressions

Article

Jul 2014
DEVELOPMENTAL SCI

The Development of Social Brain Functions in Infancy

Abstract

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