Neural correlates of attention and memory in the first year of life

Nelson, Charles A.; deRegnier, Raye‐Ann

doi:10.1080/87565649209540521

Cited by 123 publications

(181 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The results suggested that, compared to the negative component (Nc) elicited by the toys that had received positive and neutral displays, the amplitude of the Nc elicited by the toy that had received negative displays was significantly greater. The Nc is a negative deflection over frontal and central electrodes that occurs between 400 and 800 ms after the onset of the stimulus, and is generally interpreted as reflecting infants' allocation of attention, with greater amplitude indexing greater allocation of attention (Courchesne, Ganz, & Norcia, 1981;Nelson, 1994). Thus, L. J.…”

Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

939

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

939

615

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In these studies, a middle latency negative component (the Nc) was observed. The Nc has been associated with increased attention to salient stimuli (Courchesne, 1978;Nelson, 1994) as well as with recognition memory (de Haan & Nelson, 1997Nelson, 1994). de Nelson (1997, 1999) observed that the Nc component was larger in response to the mother's face than to a stranger's face.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The PSW has been associated with memory processes. A larger PSW has been interpreted as evidence that the infant is in the process of encoding the stimulus, but has not yet formed a complete representation (Nelson, 1994).Given that 6-month-olds are able to recognize their mother's face, the increased PSW activity to the stranger may have reflected updating of the memory trace for the unfamiliar stimulus, which was presented repeatedly during the study.There is some evidence that faces are "special," and that the neural substrate for face recognition is established from very early in life (Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000). A strong nativist version of this would predict that face processing should not substantially change with development, and there should be little developmental change in the neural mechanisms for face processing and recognition.…”

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Age‐related differences in neural correlates of face recognition during the toddler and preschool years

Carver

Dawson

Panagiotides

et al. 2003

Developmental Psychobiology

118

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Research on the development of face recognition in infancy has shown that infants respond to faces as if they are special and recognize familiar faces early in development. Infants also show recognition and differential attachment to familiar people very early in development. We tested the hypothesis that infants' responses to familiar and unfamiliar faces differ at different ages. Specifically, we present data showing age-related changes in infants' brain responses to mother's face versus a stranger's face in children between 18 and 54 months of age. We propose that these changes are based on age-related differences in the perceived salience of the face of the primary caregiver versus strangers.Keywords face recognition; social behavior; attachment; stranger anxiety; event-related potentials Interest in relations between brain and behavioral development has grown substantially in recent years. Of special interest is the development of the brain basis of social behavior. Although researchers interested in the role of experience in brain development have proposed that experience can alter brain areas involved in social development (e.g., Greenough, Black, & Wallace, 1987), there are very little data that address this issue. Indeed, we still have little knowledge about the development of brain systems underlying the development of social behavior and cognition. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptWe describe age-related differences in the neural correlates of face recognition and suggest ways that these differences may be related to changes in social development that arise through the child's interaction with the environment. We examined the neural correlates of the response to the mother's versus a stranger's face throughout the toddler and preschool years. We sought to better understand the development of the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces during a period of great developmental change in a number of cognitive and social domains.Infants have an inherent interest in faces, which may play a pivotal role in the development of relationships with others and in the ability to recognize the emotional states and intentions of others. A substantial body of literature makes it clear that very young infants are able to discriminate familiar from unfamiliar faces. For example, behavioral measures such as looking time and habituation have shown that, from a few days of age, infants prefer to look at a familiar versus an unfamiliar face (e.g., Pascalis & de Schonen, 1994;Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Derulle, & Fabre-Grenet, 1995), imitate selected facial movements (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1997, and by 6 weeks of age, differentially imitate familiar versus unfamiliar people (Meltzoff & Moore, 1992, 1998.Evidence from electrophysiological studies shows that by about 6 months of age infants exhibit differential brain activity to familiar faces versus unfamiliar faces, and that infants' patterns of brain activity can be influenced by how similar the un...

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Neural correlates of infants' visual responsiveness to facial expressions of emotion

1996

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An extensive literature documents the infant's ability to recognize and discriminate a variety of facial expressions of emotion. However, little is known about the neural bases of this ability. To examine the neural processes that may underlie infants' responses to facial expressions, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while 7-month-olds watched pictures of a happy face and a fearful face (Experiment 1) or an angry face and a fearful face (Experiment 2). In both experiments an early positive component, a middlelatency negative component and a later positive component were elicited. However, only when the infants saw the happy and fearful faces did the components differ for the two expressions. These results are discussed in the context of the neurobiological processes involved in perceiving facial expressions. 0 1996 John Wiley & sons. Inc.

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Neural correlates of attention and memory in the first year of life

Cited by 123 publications

References 22 publications

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Age‐related differences in neural correlates of face recognition during the toddler and preschool years

Neural correlates of infants' visual responsiveness to facial expressions of emotion

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