Superior neural individuation of mother's than stranger's faces by five months of age.

Human adults are better at recognizing different views of a given face as belonging to the same person when that person is familiar rather than unfamiliar. To clarify the developmental origin of this well-established phenomenon, one group of five-month-olds (N = 22) was presented with pictures of four different unfamiliar female faces at a fixed rate (6 Hz, 166 msec stimulus onset asynchrony), interrupted every 5th stimulus (1.2 Hz) by either their mother's face (mother oddball condition) or, in different stimulation sequences, a stranger's face (stranger oddball condition).

DEEP: A dual EEG pipeline for developmental hyperscanning studies.

Cutting-edge hyperscanning methods led to a paradigm shift in social neuroscience. It allowed researchers to measure dynamic mutual alignment of neural processes between two or more individuals in naturalistic contexts. The ever-growing interest in hyperscanning research calls for the development of transparent and validated data analysis methods to further advance the field.

Young infants process prediction errors at the theta rhythm.

Examining how young infants respond to unexpected events is key to our understanding of their emerging concepts about the world around them. From a predictive processing perspective, it is intriguing to investigate how the infant brain responds to unexpected events (i.e.

Motor cortex activity during action observation predicts subsequent action imitation in human infants.

From early on, human infants acquire novel actions through observation and imitation. Yet, the neural mechanisms that underlie infants' action learning are not well understood. Here, we combine the assessment of infants' neural processes during the observation of novel actions on objects (i.

12- to 14-month-olds expect unconstrained agents to act efficiently: Event-related potential (ERP) evidence from the head-touch paradigm.

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a goal. Accordingly, infants' expectations should be violated when observing inefficient actions.

Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning From a Predictive Processing Perspective.

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration-getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one's own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research.

Visually Entrained Theta Oscillations Increase for Unexpected Events in the Infant Brain.

Infants form basic expectations about their physical and social environment, as indicated by their attention toward events that violate their expectations. Yet little is known about the neuronal processing of unexpected events in the infant brain. Here, we used rhythmic visual brain stimulation in 9-month-olds ( = 38) to elicit oscillations of the theta (4 Hz) and the alpha (6 Hz) rhythms while presenting events with unexpected or expected outcomes.

Corrigendum: Reduced Mu Power in Response to Unusual Actions Is Context-Dependent in 1-Year-Olds.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

Reduced Mu Power in Response to Unusual Actions Is Context-Dependent in 1-Year-Olds.

During social interactions infants predict and evaluate other people's actions. Previous behavioral research found that infants' imitation of others' actions depends on these evaluations and is context-dependent: 1-year-olds predominantly imitated an unusual action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) when the model's hands were free compared to when the model's hands were occupied or restrained. In the present study, we adapted this behavioral paradigm to a neurophysiological study measuring infants' brain activity while observing usual and unusual actions via electroencephalography.