The Social Brain

A publication in the Bernard van Leer Early Childhood Focus series (bernardvanleer.org), "Developing Brains," explores how a brain develops from before birth and through the early years.  One chapter focuses on "The Social Brain," and offers insights such as...

"Human infants are born with a strong drive to interact with other people on whom they depend for care and learning.  Because human interaction is guided by goals and beliefs and not just by physical laws, attending to and interacting with other people require different skills and brain systems — sometimes referred to as the "social brain"....
 
"Human faces and voices are intrinsically rewarding for the human newborn, as shown by the fact that infants orient to and enjoy them over other kinds of visual or auditory stimulation....  If these initial preferences are responded to appropriately — if infants are surrounded by a rich, stimulating social environment — they allow them to learn rapidly about people's appearance and behaviour.  As this happens, different areas in the child's brain become progressively specialised for recognizing different aspects of the social world:  human movement, human voice, or human faces.  The specialisation of a specific brain area that is linked to perceiving faces allows children to improve gradually their ability to discriminate people's faces.

"In parallel to learning about people, infants' brains are prepared to communicate with and learn from, adults.  Because attention is initially quite limited in babies, when something needs to be learned caregivers make use of attention-getting signals, which are very similar across cultures.  This involves establishing eye contact, using a 'sing-song' voice and/or repeatedly calling the infant's name.  Brain imaging studies have shown that an area of the child's brain — the prefrontal cortex — responds to these kinds of signals as early as five months of age.  Eye contact is effective in attracting infants' attention from birth and eyes remain for a long time the face element that infants prefer to look at and that generates the strongest brain responses.  This is no surprise as the eyes are a rich source of information about someone's intentions or emotions."

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