Social Perception in the Infant Brain and Its Link to Social Behavior.

Area of Science:

• Developmental cognitive neuroscience
• Social neuroscience
• Infant development

Background:

• Social perception and behavior are crucial for human development.
• Understanding the early neural basis of social skills is essential.
• Previous research indicates specialized brain regions for social perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the link between social perception and social behavior in early human development.
• To examine how variability in social perception relates to social behavior longitudinally.
• To identify early neural markers of social behavior.

Main Methods:

• A longitudinal study with 98 infants.
• Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure cortical responses to dynamic faces at 7 months.
• The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire to assess sociability at 18 months.

Main Results:

• Viewing dynamic faces activated superior temporal cortices in 7-month-old infants.
• Greater engagement of the right superior temporal cortex at 7 months predicted higher sociability at 18 months.
• This demonstrates a link between early social perception and later social behavior.

Conclusions:

• The superior temporal cortex plays a specialized role in social perception from early in life.
• Early individual differences in social perception are associated with later social behavior.
• This study provides novel longitudinal evidence for a social brain-behavior association in development.