CIMeC Research Seminar – Lara Bardi

19^th December 2012
11am

• Lara Bardi, Department of General Psychology University of Padova

Title: The origin of the social brain. Inborn predispositions for social stimuli in humans.

Abstract: Humans are intensely social creatures. The ability to recognize, manipulate and respond to socially relevant information is critical for our life. On this respect, an important question concerns the origin and the development of these abilities. Our research focuses on the critical precursors of the “social brain”. I will present recent findings indicating that two-day-old babies are able to discriminate the motion of living creatures from the motion of inanimate objects and, at their first exposure to point-light animations, preferentially orient to biological motion. Moreover, I will present data showing how the visual ability to extract information from social signals, such as faces and biological motion matures rapidly in the first months of life. For example, six-month-old infants use locomotion direction to orient their attention in space. These findings support the view that, similarly to what was observed for faces, humans are predisposed from birth to specifically respond to biological motion. New knowledge about the visual processing of social signals in early infancy might provide important insights for our understanding of altered developmental trajectories of brain specialization in the social domain, such as in autism.

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