To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear) and infants (P400 was larger for fear). Behavioral measures showed no overt attentional bias toward fearful faces in adults, but in infants, the duration of the first fixation was longer for fearful than happy faces. Together, these results suggest that the neural systems underlying the differential processing of fearful and happy/neutral faces are functional early in life, and that affective factors may play an important role in modulating infants' face processing. KeywordsBrain Development; Electrophysiology; Emotion; Face Perception Humans glean a wealth of behaviorally and biologically significant information from others' facial expressions. Infants will crawl over a visual cliff to approach a novel toy if their mother's face displays a happy expression, whereas they avoid the cliff if their mother poses a fearful facial expression (Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985). Investigation into the neural mechanisms that underlie the processing of facial expressions may, therefore, provide a useful model as to how behaviorally and emotionally significant stimuli are processed in the human brain, and how the processing of such stimuli differs from the processing of other types of visual stimuli.Recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) provides one tool to examine the neural mechanisms of facial expression processing. ERP studies of face processing in adults have revealed that, compared to other visual objects, faces typically elicit a larger negative deflection at occipital-temporal recording sites approximately 170 ms after the stimulus onset (Bentin,

Exposure to faces is known to shape and change the face processing system; however, no study has yet documented infants' natural daily first‐hand exposure to faces. One‐ and three‐month‐old infants' visual experience was recorded through head‐mounted cameras. The video recordings were coded for faces to determine: (1) How often are infants exposed to faces? (2) To what type of faces are they exposed? and (3) Do frequently encountered face types reflect infants' typical pattern of perceptual narrowing? As hypothesized, infants spent a large proportion of their time (25%) exposed to faces; these faces were primarily female (70%), own‐race (96%), and adult‐age (81%). Infants were exposed to more individual exemplars of female, own‐race, and adult‐age faces than to male, other‐race, and child‐ or older‐adult‐age faces. Each exposure to own‐race faces was longer than to other‐race faces. There were no differences in exposure duration related to the gender or age of the face. Previous research has found that the face types frequently experienced by our participants are preferred over and more successfully recognized than other face types. The patterns of face exposure revealed in the current study coincide with the known trajectory of perceptual narrowing seen later in infancy.© 2013 The Authors. Developmental Psychobiology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 56: 249–261, 2014.

Data are reported from 3 groups of children residing in Bucharest, Romania. Face recognition in currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized, and never-institutionalized children was assessed at 3 time points: preintervention (n = 121), 30 months of age (n = 99), and 42 months of age (n = 77). Children watched photographs of caregiver and stranger faces while event-related potentials were recorded. Results demonstrate that institutionalized children show pervasive cortical hypoarousal in response to faces and that foster care is somewhat effective in remediating this deficit by 42 months of age. All 3 groups of children distinguished between the familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results have the potential to inform an understanding of the role of early experience in the development of the neural systems that subserve face recognition.Faces are arguably the most important visual stimulus used in human social communication. Faces provide a wealth of information about other individuals, including identity, sex, age, focus of attention, and emotional state. Most adults are experts at processing faces, and quickly and effortlessly decipher information from faces during social exchanges. Although young infants have rudimentary face processing capabilities (e.g., they can recognize their mother within the first days of life and can discriminate basic emotions within the first months of life; Field, 1983;Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Derulle, & Fabre-Grenet, 1995), children do not show adult-like speed and accuracy in face perception until adolescence. Although the behavioral development of face perception has been well characterized, less is known about the development of the neural systems underlying face perception. Clearly, the origins of behavioral change lie in the development of these neural systems.Previous research has demonstrated that adults' face expertise is subserved by a distributed network of brain areas that are preferentially involved in face processing, including the ''fusiform face area'' within the fusiform gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala, and areas of the prefrontal cortex (Adolphs, 2002;Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2002;Iidaka et al., 2001;Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997). Fewer studies have examined the development of these neural systems, largely due to the methodological limitations involved in using neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging with developing populations (although near infrared spectroscopy shows promise for use with infants and young children; see Otsuka et al., 2007;Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002). However, event-related potentials (ERPs), aThe work reported in this article was supported by funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We thank Gwen Gordon for assistance in data management; Don Guthrie for statistical consultation; Sebastian Koga for overseeing the project in Romania; Hermi Woodward and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development for input regarding ...

Successful negotiation of human social interactions rests on having a theory of mind - an understanding of how others' behaviors can be understood in terms of internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. A core theory-of-mind skill is the ability to decode others' mental states on the basis of observable information, such as facial expressions. Although several recent studies have focused on the neural correlates of reasoning about mental states, no research has addressed the question of what neural systems underlie mental state decoding. We used dense-array event-related potentials (ERP) to show that decoding mental states from pictures of eyes is associated with an N270-400 component over inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions of the right hemisphere. Source estimation procedures suggest that orbitofrontal and medial temporal regions may underlie this ERP effect. These findings suggest that different components of everyday theory-of-mind skills may rely on dissociable neural mechanisms.

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad facial expressions of emotion. At 3 assessments (baseline, 30 months, and 42 months), institutionalized children showed markedly smaller amplitudes and longer latencies for the occipital components P1, N170, and P400 compared to family-reared children. By 42 months, ERP amplitudes and latencies of children placed in foster care were intermediate between the institutionalized and family-reared children, suggesting that foster care may be partially effective in ameliorating adverse neural changes caused by institutionalization. The age at which children were placed into foster care was unrelated to their ERP outcomes at 42 months. Facial emotion processing was similar in all 3 groups of children; specifically, fearful faces elicited larger amplitude and longer latency responses than happy faces for the frontocentral components P250 and Nc. These results have important implications for understanding of the role that experience plays in shaping the developing brain.