Abstract
Eye gaze is an important social cue which is used to determine another person's focus of attention and intention to communicate. In combination with a fearful facial expression eye gaze can also signal threat in the environment. The ability to detect and understand others' social signals is essential in order to avoid danger and enable social evaluation. It has been a matter of debate when infants are able to use gaze cues and emotional facial expressions in reference to external objects. Here we demonstrate that by 3 months of age the infant brain differentially responds to objects as a function of how other people are reacting to them. Using event-related electrical brain potentials (ERPs), we show that an indicator of infants' attention is enhanced by an adult's expression of fear toward an unfamiliar object. The infant brain showed an increased Negative central (Nc) component toward objects that had been previously cued by an adult's eye gaze and frightened facial expression. Our results further suggest that infants' sensitivity cannot be due to a general arousal elicited by a frightened face with eye gaze directed at an object. The neural attention system of 3 month old infants is sensitive to an adult's eye gaze direction in combination with a fearful expression. This early capacity may lay the foundation for the development of more sophisticated social skills such as social referencing, language, and theory of mind.
Highlights
Social referencing is the ability to search for and to use social signals in order to modulate behavior in new or ambiguous situations [1]
Objects that had previously been gaze cued by an adult with a fearful expression elicited a substantially increased Negative central (Nc) component on right fronto-central channels when compared to objects that had been looked at by a neutral face
Visual inspection of the data suggested that the electrical brain potentials (ERPs) may be more negative in the fearful condition even before onset of the Nc
Summary
Social referencing is the ability to search for and to use social signals in order to modulate behavior in new or ambiguous situations [1]. Adults constantly make use of social signals like emotional expressions to guide behavior in ambiguous or dangerous situations [e.g. 2,3]. Often this is done without conscious control or cognitive effort. Fearful faces which may signal threat automatically captures attention [4,5,6]. An important neural structure underlying this social threat detection system is the amygdala which is sensitive to fearful expressions and to eye gaze direction in angry and fearful faces [7,8]. The developmental trajectory that leads to the efficient detection of relevant social signals in human adults has only been investigated in parts
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