The Development of the Social Brain: An Affective View

Principal Investigators: JARI HIETANEN
Researcher: Jukka Leppänen

Human Information Processing -Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Tampere

Human adults are adept at using different facial cues for the regulation of social behaviour. It has been suggested that a repeated exposure to faces from birth onwards makes the human brain specialized for perceiving facial information. Because faces are also affectively meaningful stimuli, it is increasingly acknowledged that affective processes and the emotional circuitry of the brain may play a key role in the development of the face processing systems. Therefore, it is important to specify how affective reactions to facial signals develop and which role they play in the development of the face-sensitive brain systems.

In the present project, the aim is to examine the onset age at which human infants begin to show differential affective responses to eye contact and facial emotional expressions, how facially induced affective reactions are related to neural processing of faces, and whether the development of these processes is different between infants with and without high risk for autism. Participants' affective and cognitive responses to facial stimuli will be assessed by measuring various physiological responses (e.g., skin conductance responses, frontal asymmetry in electroencephalography, and face-sensitive components of the event-related brain potentials). It is also examined whether the emergence of affective reactions to facial expressions is reflected in infants' visual behaviour toward faces. For this purpose, an eye-tracker apparatus will be used.

The results of this project will provide new knowledge on the development of affective processes involved in the processing of another person's gaze direction and facial expressions. The results will expand our knowledge on the critical processes involved in the development of social cognition and, in addition, contribute to a body of knowledge, which ultimately will show that affective reactions to socially relevant stimuli have a central role in guiding the development of adult-like social brain. Importantly, the results have also a potential for developing tools for the detection of early signs of autism.

Contact: jari.hietanen(at)uta.fi, tel: +358 3 3551 7720