Spontaneous Social Cognition: Mechanisms and Development

To adapt to the fluid and rapidly-changing social world, human brains have to process social information rapidly and spontaneously. However, most studies so far focus on slow and deliberate social reasoning, with little known about how human brains process social information rapidly and spontaneously, or how such processing develops. I will investigate how human brains react to perceived eye contact, one of the most critical tools for social communication. Firstly, I will compare eye contact processing in healthy adults and patients who have damage to a specific part of their brain, to reveal the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying eye contact processing. Secondly, I will investigate the development of eye contact processing, by measuring neural responses to eye contact in young infants, comparing British and Japanese individuals, with different cultural norms in relation to the use of eye contact, tracking the development of sighted infants of blind parents, who would have very limited experience of eye contact from their parents, and studying children with autism, who show developmental impairment in social interaction and communication. These studies will shed light on how the human brain effectively deals with a fluid and rapidly-changing social world, and how this ability develops.

Cognitive neuroscience studies have revealed that several cortical and subcortical structures in the human brain, collectively referred to as the social brain, are functionally specialized for social cognition. A fundamental question about the social brain is how it processes a fluid and rapidly changing social world. To perform this function, the social brain has to be fast, spontaneous and on-line. One of the best examples of spontaneous social cognition is the eye contact effect, a phenomenon in which perceived eye contact spontaneously modulates social cognition. Recently I proposed the fast-track modulator (FTM) model to explain the eye contact effect, and the aim of the current proposal is to investigate the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying, and the development of, this effect. Firstly, I will test the prediction derived from the FTM model that subcortical regions of the brain initially detect eye contact, then modulate the key structures of the social brain. I will record eye movement and cortical activities of healthy adults when they spontaneously process eye contact, with experimental tasks specifically designed to test the predictions derived from the FTM model. I will also assess the eye contact effect in patients with a lesion in a key structure of the subcortical route. Secondly, I will test the prediction derived from the FTM model, that infants are born with widespread and non-specific cortical processing of social stimuli such as eye contact, which is then modulated by input from the postnatal environment to develop more specialized and effective processing of social stimuli. To do this I will assess the neural correlates of the eye contact effect in young infants, examine how the familial and cultural environment modulate development of the eye contact effect, and examine how developmental disorders such as autism, which affect the development of social interaction, affect development of the eye contact effect. Findings from these projects will shed new light on the cognitive, neural and developmental basis of spontaneous social cognition. Such an understanding is essential if we are to understand how the human brain adapts to the social environment and achieves complex social communication rapidly, spontaneously and on-line. It will also help us understand how the familial and cultural environment, as well as developmental disorders such as autism, affect its development.