Social Signals Recognized By Infants At Younger Age Than Previously Believed

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Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry;  Mental Health;  Autism
Article Date: 11 Jun 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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Infants as young as three months old are already sensitive to emotional signals referring to objects, according to an article released on June 10, 1008 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

It was previously thought that young infants were not capable of processing social signals unless they were directed to them specifically. The faculty to find and use social signals in guiding one's behavior in a social setting, a skill known as social referencing, was accepted as developing at the age of approximately 12 months. Before this age, it was accepted that younger infants could not be guided outside of face-to-face social interactions, and thus could not use social cues to process the world around them.

In an effort to explore the capacity of young infants to build these social cues, this study, led by Stefanie Hoehl, tested three month old infants and how they reacted electrophysiologically to specific pictures. The babies viewed images of people who looked at new objects with either fearful or neutral facial expression, and it was found that the brain activity to the objects varied depending on the emotion of the adult. This indicates that the adults' faces had been used by the infants as referential social cues.

Hoehl summarizes these results: "At three months of age, the infants' attention toward a new object was heightened when an adult had expressed fear toward the object."

Tricia Striano, of Hunter College, points out that this is an important insight on the social development of infants, especially as it might relate to various social development disorders: "Not only do these findings offer new insight as to how the young infant brain processes communicative social signals, but these advancements are also important in eventually being able to target when infants may be at risk for atypical communicative developments such as autism."

She continues, extending her comments on autistic children: "Brain measures tell us how infants process the world around them, even before they have the behavioral repertoire to show us. Children with autism often do not pay attention to relevant social signals. Here, we see that the typically developing infant brain is already effectively attending to and parsing relevant social cues and using these signals to process new objects they encounter in the world."

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Young Infants' Neural Processing of Objects Is Affected by Eye Gaze Direction and Emotional Expression.
Hoehl S, Wiese L, Striano T
PLoS ONE 3(6): e2389.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002389
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Written by Anna Sophia McKenney
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