Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Infant Behav Dev. 2022 Aug;68:101727. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101727. Epub 2022 Jun 3.
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.
婴儿期社会大脑功能的发展依赖于这样的研究，即关注婴儿如何参与第一人称社会互动或观察个体代理及其行为。行为研究表明，观察和从第三方社会互动中学习在早期社会和道德发展中起着基础性作用。然而，在婴儿期观察第三方社会互动所涉及的大脑系统尚不清楚。本研究检验了这样一个假设，即在额叶和颞叶皮层中发现的大脑系统，在成人和儿童中已被确定，在婴儿期开始专门处理第三方社会互动处理。使用功能近红外光谱 (fNIRS) 测量了 6 至 13 个月大的 62 名婴儿的大脑反应，同时观察了第三方社会互动和两个对照条件，婴儿分别观察两个个体动作和婴儿观察反转的社会互动。结果表明，当婴儿观察第三方社会互动时，他们优先参与位于背内侧前额叶皮层内的大脑区域。这些发现表明，处理第三方社会互动的大脑系统在人类个体发生早期开始发展，因此可能在支持对社会互动的解释和学习方面发挥基础性作用。
