Huang Shuran, Pollak Seth D, Xie Wanze
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 24;16(1):6838. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-62210-1.
Human's abilities to reason about what others may be feeling undergo prolonged development throughout childhood and adolescence, yet the mechanisms driving the emergence of these skills remain elusive. This set of studies, conducted within the same sample of 5- to 10-year-old children, examines how spontaneous perceptual discrimination of facial configurations and activation of conceptual knowledge about emotions become integrated across development. Perceptual discrimination is measured using an EEG frequency tagging paradigm (Study 1). Conceptual knowledge is evaluated with a conceptual similarity rating task (Study 2). Two behavioral tasks (sorting and matching) are employed to assess emotion understanding (Study 3). Representational similarity analysis assesses the predictive effects of perceptual discrimination and conceptual knowledge on children's behavioral judgments. Here we show that while the ability to discriminate stereotypical facial configurations emerges by preschool age, its influence diminishes with age. In contrast, children's inferences about other people's emotions come to rely more on conceptual knowledge with increasing age (and, presumably, social experience).
人类推断他人感受的能力在整个童年和青少年时期都在持续发展，然而驱动这些技能出现的机制仍然难以捉摸。这组研究在5至10岁儿童的同一样本中进行，考察了面部构型的自发感知辨别和情绪概念知识的激活如何在整个发育过程中整合。使用脑电图频率标记范式测量感知辨别（研究1）。用概念相似性评分任务评估概念知识（研究2）。采用两项行为任务（分类和匹配）来评估情绪理解（研究3）。表征相似性分析评估感知辨别和概念知识对儿童行为判断的预测作用。我们在此表明，虽然辨别刻板面部构型的能力在学龄前就已出现，但其影响随着年龄增长而减弱。相比之下，随着年龄（大概还有社会经验）的增长，儿童对他人情绪的推断越来越依赖概念知识。
