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Updated: May 2, 2026

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Observing Virtual Social Interactions
Published on: July 6, 2011
Friend or foe? Early social evaluation of human interactions
Marine Buon1, Pierre Jacob2, Sylvie Margules1
1Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Département d'Etudes Cognitives-Ecole Normale Supérieure, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France.
Abstract:
We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.
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