Binding actions and emotions in the infant’s brain

ABSTRACT

The first year represents an exceptional time of development during which important social skills emerge, like action and emotion understanding. However, to date, no study explored the neural underpinnings of infants’ ability to bind emotion- to action-related information. To assess this issue, we measured EEG activity while 6-month-old infants observed the same action performed by an actress displaying three different emotional expressions (happiness, anger and neutral). Results have shown that actions embedded in an emotional context (happiness and anger) elicited larger early negativity at parieto-occipital sites compared to a neutral context. This finding suggests that already at 6 months of age, infants use information coming from facial expressions to detect the saliency and relevance of others’ actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Action
• emotion
• infants
• ERP

Acknowledgments

We thank the babies who participated in this study, their parents, and Ioana Marchis for assistance with testing. We also thank Lucian Zarnescu for the help in creating the stimuli and special thanks to Carlo Toneatto for his technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ERC Starting Grant to Chiara Turati [ODMIR 241176].