Neural correlates of infants' sensitivity to vocal expressions of peers
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Updated: Mar 3, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
Manuela Missana1, Nicole Altvater-Mackensen2, Tobias Grossmann3
1Department of Early Child Development and Culture, Leipzig University, Marschnerstrasse 29, 04109 Leipzig, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Abstract:
Responding to others' emotional expressions is an essential and early developing social skill among humans. Much research has focused on how infants process facial expressions, while much less is known about infants' processing of vocal expressions. We examined 8-month-old infants' processing of other infants' vocalizations by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to positive (infant laughter), negative (infant cries), and neutral (adult hummed speech) vocalizations. Our ERP results revealed that hearing another infant cry elicited an enhanced negativity (N200) at temporal electrodes around 200ms, whereas listening to another infant laugh resulted in an enhanced positivity (P300) at central electrodes around 300ms. This indexes that infants' brains rapidly respond to a crying peer during early auditory processing stages, but also selectively respond to a laughing peer during later stages associated with familiarity detection processes. These findings provide evidence for infants' sensitivity to vocal expressions of peers and shed new light on the neural processes underpinning emotion processing in infants.
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