Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
Soc Neurosci. 2023 Aug;18(4):207-217. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2023.2245597. Epub 2023 Aug 23.
Preverbal infants appear to be more attracted by prosocial characters and events, as typically assessed using preferential looking times and manual choice. However, infants' neural correlates of observed prosocial and antisocial interactions are still scarce. Here, we familiarized 5-month-old ( = 24) infants with a prosocial and antisocial scene (i.e., a character either helping or hindering) and infants' Event-Related Potentials (ERP) were recorded in response to the presentation of short video clips of the prosocial and antisocial interaction. On a neural level, results revealed that infants could discriminate between helping and hindering events at an early stage of processing, as shown by a larger N290 response to the former compared to the latter. Further, while the Nc - typically indexing attentional processes - was larger for antisocial over prosocial events, the LPP, indexing cognitive evaluation of the stimuli, was larger for prosocial over antisocial actions. Finally, infants' higher scores on the effortful control temperamental subscale were related to infants' increased N290 neural sensitivity to antisocial scenes. Together, these findings provide new evidence of the time course of infants' ERP responses during the observation of helping and hindering interactions, which involves both attentional and socially relevant processes.
婴儿在言语前阶段似乎更容易被亲社会的角色和事件所吸引，这通常可以通过偏好注视时间和手动选择来评估。然而，婴儿观察到的亲社会和反社会互动的神经相关仍然很少。在这里，我们让 5 个月大（ = 24）的婴儿熟悉一个亲社会和反社会的场景（即一个帮助或阻碍的角色），并记录婴儿对亲社会和反社会互动的短视频片段的事件相关电位（ERP）。在神经水平上，结果表明，婴儿可以在处理的早期阶段区分帮助和阻碍事件，这表现为与后者相比，前者的 N290 反应更大。此外，虽然 Nc - 通常表示注意力过程 - 在反社会事件中比亲社会事件更大，但 LPP， 表示对刺激的认知评估，在亲社会行为中比反社会行为更大。最后，婴儿在努力控制气质子量表上的得分越高，他们对反社会场景的 N290 神经敏感性就越高。总之，这些发现为婴儿在观察帮助和阻碍互动时的 ERP 反应的时间进程提供了新的证据，这涉及到注意力和社会相关的过程。
