Friend or Foe? Exploring Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain

• In Event: Growing up in a Social Context: Brain and Emotional Development From Infancy to Early Adolescence

Abstract

Forming an impression of another person based on her behavior is considered a vital building block of human social cognition as it can guide adaptive action by approaching friendly and avoiding hostile individuals. Much research with adults implicates the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in impression formation and person perception. There also exists behavioral evidence to suggest that preverbal infants evaluate (non-human) agents’ social actions and tend to approach helpful and avoid harmful agents. Yet little is known about the brain processes which underpin the early developing ability to form impressions about another human agent. The current study examined impression formation using a novel task combining functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eyetracking in a sample of 11-month-old infants’ (N = 77). During the impression formation (learning) phase, infants viewed four different individuals (faces) expressing either happiness or anger directed at them (direct gaze) or directed away from them (averted gaze) while their brain responses in medial prefrontal and superior temporal cortices were measured. This was followed by a test phase during which infants’ person preference was assessed using eyetracking (infants saw the four individuals’ faces again showing direct gaze and a neutral expression). Our results show that infants’ mPFC responses predicted their person preference. Specifically, greater mPFC response was associated with greater preference for the happy-direct gaze individual. This suggests that mPFC is involved in impression formation in human infants, attesting to the early ontogenetic emergence of brain processes supporting person perception.

Authors

• Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Kathleen Krol, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Non-Presenting Author