Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence.

Converging evidence demonstrates that emotion processing from facial expressions continues to improve throughout childhood and part of adolescence. Here we investigated whether this is also the case for emotions conveyed by non-linguistic vocal expressions, another key aspect of social interactions. We tested 225 children and adolescents (age 5-17) and 30 adults in a forced-choice labeling task using vocal bursts expressing four basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness).

Body-selective areas in the visual cortex are less active in children than in adults.

Our ability to read other people's non-verbal signals gets refined throughout childhood and adolescence. How this is paralleled by brain development has been investigated mainly with regards to face perception, showing a protracted functional development of the face-selective visual cortical areas. In view of the importance of whole-body expressions in interpersonal communication it is important to understand the development of brain areas sensitive to these social signals.