Development of Social Cognition in Infants

Abstract

The social brain network has been studied extensively in adults, but the development of this network in infants has received less attention. A relatively new method to measure brain activity in infants is fNIRS. An earlier study used this method to investigate activation in the social brain network of infants, in response to social and nonsocial stimuli. They found localized activation in response to social stimuli. The current study aims to replicate part of this study to increase the reliability of the results and to learn more about the potential of fNIRS in infant studies. A sensor pad with 16 optodes and 22 channels was used to measure the hemodynamic response in infants in response to social dynamic stimuli, nonsocial dynamic stimuli and baseline images. The data of each channel for each infant was inspected and rejected when it did not meet the required criteria. The findings of this study differed from the original study. No support for localized activation in response to social stimuli was found. Possibly this was due to the amount of data that had to be rejected.