The Social Brain: A Developmental Perspective 0262044145, 9780262044141

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The Social Brain A Developmental Perspective

The Social Brain A Developmental Perspective

edited by Jean Decety

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2020 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Serif by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Decety, Jean, editor. Title: The social brain : a developmental perspective / edited by Jean Decety. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019046415 | ISBN 9780262044141 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Social perception. | Developmental psychology. | Evolutionary psychology. | Neurosciences. Classification: LCC BF323.S63 .S624 2020 | DDC 153—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046415

Contents

Preface    ix I

Early Social Perception and Cognition 1

Development of Voice Perception in the Human Brain    3 Marie-­Hélène Grosbras and Pascal Belin

2

Building a Face-­Space for Social Cognition    23 Fabrice Damon, David Méary, Michelle de Haan, and Olivier Pascalis

3

Principles and Concepts in Early Moral Cognition    41 Fransisca Ting, Melody Buyukozer Dawkins, Maayan Stavans, and Renée Baillargeon

4

Early Social Cognition: Exploring the Role of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex    67 Tobias Grossmann

5

Foundations of Imitation    89 Virginia Slaughter

6

The Development of the Social Brain within a Family Context    107 Diane Goldenberg, Narcis Marshall, Sofia Cardenas, and Darby Saxbe

II

Language and Theory of Mind 7

Infants’ Early Competence for Language and Symbols    127 Ghislaine Dehaene-­Lambertz, Ana Fló, and Marcela Peña

vi Contents

8

Developing a Theory of Mind: Are Infants Sensitive to How Other People Represent the World?    143 Dora Kampis, Frances Buttelmann, and Ágnes Melinda Kovács

9

How Do Young Children Become Moral Agents? A Developmental Perspective    161 Markus Paulus

10 Understanding Others’ Minds and Morals: Progress and Innovation of Infant Electrophysiology    179 Caitlin M. Hudac and Jessica A. Sommerville 11 Cognitive and Neural Correlates of Children’s Spontaneous Verbal Deception    199 Xiao Pan Ding and Kang Lee III Prosocial Behavior 12 Multiple Mechanisms of Prosocial Development    219 Jean Decety and Nikolaus Steinbeis 13 Selective Prosocial Behavior in Early Childhood    247 Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Tara A. Karasewich, and Kristen A. Dunfield 14 What Do We (Not) Know about the Genetics of Empathy?    263 Lior Abramson, Florina Uzefovsky, and Ariel Knafo-­Noam 15 The Development of Children’s Sharing Behavior: Recipients’ and Givers’ Characteristics    285 Hagit Sabato and Tehila Kogut IV Social Categorization 16 The Role of Essentialism in Children’s Social Judgments    305 Susan A. Gelman and Rachel D. Fine 17 Are Humans Born to Hate? Three Myths and Three Developmental Lessons about the Origins of Social Categorization and Intergroup Bias    327 Marjorie Rhodes V

Atypical Social Cognition 18 Toward a Translational Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism    347 Kevin A. Pelphrey, Jennifer R. Frey, and Michael J. Crowley

Contents vii

19 Developmental Origins of Psychopathy    367 Essi Viding, Eamon McCrory, and Ruth Roberts 20 Morals, Money, and Risk Taking from Childhood to Adulthood: The Neurodevelopmental Framework of Fuzzy Trace Theory    385 Valerie F. Reyna and Christos Panagiotopoulos Contributors    407 Index    409

Preface

Social cognition encompasses all the information-­processing mechanisms that underlie how people capture, process, store, and apply information about others to navigate social situations. It focuses on the importance of cognitive and emotional processes in our social interactions. The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us. The past decade has seen an increase in the study of the developmental origins of the social mind. While evolutionary theory defines how social competencies have been shaped by natural selection, developmental psychologists have come up with ingenious ways to test the social abilities of infants and young children, focusing on what they do rather than on what they say. Similarly, neuroscientists have begun to examine the neurobiological mechanisms that implement and guide early social cognition. This new knowledge supports the view that social cognition is present early in infancy and childhood in surprisingly sophisticated forms. Exploring this dynamic relationship between biology and social cognition, from infancy through childhood, allows us to examine key processes in typical and atypical development. From this research, a new picture of childhood and human nature has emerged. Far from being mere unfinished adults, babies and young children are exquisitely designed by evolution to capture relevant social information and to learn and explore their social environment. This new volume brings together a range of empirical and theoretical views from both developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience, and covers a core set of questions and topics that concern the development of the social mind. The basic topics about the origins, development, and biological bases of the human social mind include voice and face recognition, language, theory of mind, group dynamics, morality,

x Preface

prosocial behavior, and social decision-­making. Contributions from evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral economics inform these included themes. Structure of the Book The book is divided into five parts. The first part provides scientific advances in early social perception and cognition. Evidence about the emergence and development of social information is presented by Marie-­Hélène Grosbras and Pascal Belin. The authors highlight similarities with the development of face processing and discuss the implications and future directions for research. In the second chapter, Fabrice Damon, David Méary, Michelle de Haan, and Olivier Pascalis review early social perceptual biases associated with face processing. They argue that there is a continuity in social cognitive development in the capacities specific to the social domain and linked to later theory of mind. In chapter 3, Fransisca Ting, Melody Buyukozer Dawkins, Maayan Stavans, and Renée Baillargeon review the evidence for four moral principles that guide infants’ moral reasoning. They demonstrate that very early moral cognition is remarkably sophisticated and provides a rich foundation for infants’ adaptation to their social world. Next, Tobias Grossmann discusses the emerging body of infant neuroimaging studies, focusing on the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in social information processing. Although imitation plays a fundamental role in social learning, Virginia Slaughter challenges the view that human infants possess from birth an innate mechanism to imitate other people’s actions. In the sixth chapter, Diane Goldenberg, Narcis Marshall, Sofia Cardenas, and Darby Saxbe review the empirical research on how parents are represented in a child’s brain and how a child is represented in the parents’ brains, providing insight into potential mechanisms that support the co-­construction of neural representations over time. The second section of this volume explores recent research on early infant competences for language and theory of mind. In chapter 7, Ghislaine Dehaene-­Lambertz, Ana Fló, and Marcela Peña propose that human cognition has been boosted beyond the codevelopment of social cognition through language and symbolic thinking, which can be observed from the first months of life on. Dora Kampis, Frances Buttelmann, and Ágnes Melinda Kovács review recent findings regarding theory of mind abilities in

Preface xi

infants and children and explore the ability to understand that the same reality may be represented under different subjective descriptions by different people. Markus Paulus, in chapter 9, presents a developmental account on how young children become moral agents. He makes the case that a full understanding of moral development requires taking into account the dynamic interplay between biological bases, the social environment, and the active role of the child. In chapter 10, Caitlin Hudac and Jessica Sommerville identify how electrophysiology can contribute to identifying the psychological processes that underlie early theory of mind abilities and early social moral concerns. In chapter 11, Xiao Pan Ding and Kang Lee focus on verbal deception and how theory of mind and executive functions play a functional role in the development of spontaneous lying. They also provide neuroimaging studies to understand the neural mechanisms of lying. The third section of the volume focuses on the origins and development of prosocial behavior. In chapter 12, Jean Decety and Nikolaus Steinbeis review evidence showing that natural selection has equipped the human brain with a set of innate predispositions that motivate us to be social, cooperative, and altruistic. They show how the mechanisms involved in prosociality mature and interact with social and cultural environments. In chapter 13, Valerie Kuhlmeier, Tara Karasewich, and Kristen Dunfield present the partner choice model to account for the advantage of being selective with our prosocial behavior. In chapter 14, Lior Abramson, Florina Uzefovsky, and Ariel Knafo-­Noam focus on how empathy is related to genetic variation across people and how this relationship varies through development and is specific to different components of empathy. Next, Hagit Sabato and Tehila Kogut, in chapter 15, discuss the development of children’s sharing behavior and highlight the importance of the interaction between the prospective helper’s and the recipient’s (or the situation’s) characteristics in our understanding of the development of prosociality in children. The fourth section includes two contributions about how young children make social categories. In chapter 16, Susan Gelman and Rachel Fine provide an up-­to-­date overview of research on psychological essentialism in children’s categories. They discuss how essentialism can distort children’s social judgments of others. Then, in chapter 17, Marjorie Rhodes considers three myths and three developmental lessons about the development

xii Preface

and nature of social categorization. She provides new insight into how to ameliorate their negative consequences and improve intergroup relations. The final section of the volume is dedicated to atypical social cognition. In chapter 18, Kevin Pelphrey, Jennifer Frey, and Michael Crowley review developmental social neuroscience evidence about autism spectrum disorder biomarkers. In chapter 19, Essi Viding, Eamon McCrory, and Ruth Roberts focus on the developmental origins of psychopathy and show the progress that has been made in charting brain abnormalities associated with several neurocognitive hallmarks of the disorder. In the final chapter, Valerie Reyna and Christos Panagiotopoulos present the fuzzy trace theory to explain how cognitive representations of moral and monetary decisions, along with reward motivation and social values, are crucial for understanding the adaptive social brain as well as developmental atypicalities such as autism and psychopathy. Overall, this volume brings a fresh perspective to the development of social cognition and shows the value of bringing together developmental psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience to illuminate our understanding of the origins, mechanism, functions, and development of the many capacities that have evolved to facilitate and regulate a wide variety of behaviors and motivations, fine-­tuned to group living. Jean Decety Chicago, IL

I  Early Social Perception and Cognition

1  Development of Voice Perception in the Human Brain Marie-­Hélène Grosbras and Pascal Belin

Overview Routinely and effortlessly we extract a wealth of socially relevant information from voices. This goes far beyond speech comprehension and allows us to recognize a variety of attributes from the speaker such as identity or affect. Here we review evidence showing that this expertise starts developing very early on in infancy and continues to refine throughout childhood and part of adolescence. We also examine the maturation of dedicated voice processing mechanisms in the brain. We highlight similarities with the development of face processing and discuss implications and future directions for research. Introduction Identifying relevant features from voices is paramount not only for developing linguistic competences, but also for building sophisticated social interactions throughout the life span. Indeed, humans exhibit impressive skills for extracting subtle information from a voice, including identity, age, gender, and minute emotional or intentional expressions. An extensive corpus of studies has described the perceptual and neurophysiological processes specific to voices as compared to other sounds. This involves voice-­sensitive brain regions, which are more active when listening to conspecific vocalizations than when listening to environmental sounds, centered primarily around the temporal voice areas (TVA) along the superior temporal cortex (see figure 1.1B), and including also prefrontal, limbic, and subcortical regions. These processes are probably phylogenetically ancient as homologous processes are present in other species. Their ontogeny is less known.

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M.-­H. Grosbras and P. Belin

Yet the ability to perceive, categorize, and appraise complex stimuli such as voices in a vast range of contexts necessitates advanced expertise, which must be built as an individual grows up. The consolidation of this expertise is facilitated by the bias that even young infants show to attend to social cues, including faces or voices, more than other stimuli in their environment (Valenza, Simion, Cassia, & Umiltà, 1996; Vouloumanos, Hauser, Werker, & Martin, 2010). Being able to process vocal stimuli in a sophisticated way is obviously important for language acquisition. However, in addition—­and often overlooked in the developmental literature—­this ability is also fundamental for learning to interact with others. In this regard, voice has sometimes been compared to an “auditory face” (Belin, Fecteau, & Bedard, 2004), conveying cues about an individual traits and states of mind. Indeed, both voices and faces carry important social information; they are present early in the infant’s environment, and their perception also is modulated by context. One might thus expect a similar developmental trajectory for the perception of both channels of social interaction. Extensive research has shown that face perception skills (including identity, emotion, and intention recognition) are present very early on in infancy (e.g., Walker-­Andrews, 1997) and continue to improve during adolescence (Scherf, Behrmann, & Dahl, 2012). Likewise, brain activity in the fusiform cortex sensitive to face stimuli, which is present in young infants (Halit, Csibra, Volein, & Johnson, 2004), continues to mature during adolescence (Scherf et al., 2012). In comparison, the development of voice processing has been less investigated, and these studies have focused principally on infancy and early childhood. Yet, as with faces, expertise for voices continues to mature throughout childhood and adolescence, alongside improvement and complexification of verbal but also nonverbal communication. Here we present an overview of the main findings, at the behavioral and neural levels, concerning voice processing in infants, children, and adolescents. Development of Voice Perception Skills Infancy and Toddlerhood Using measures of heart rate variability, several studies have provided evidence that near-­term fetuses in utero are sensitive to familiar voices (Lee & Kisilevsky, 2014). At birth, infants prefer to orient toward their mother’s

Development of Voice Perception in the Human Brain 5

voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). This sensitivity to voice identity appears earlier than recognition of speech-­related features and may facilitate language acquisition. Indeed, it is only from two months onward that infants can discriminate between different phonemes (Friederici, 2005), and their recognition improves if the phonemes are spoken by their mother than an unfamiliar speaker (Barker & Newman, 2004). Early on, infants also can extract categorical identity attributes from voices. After using habituation paradigms, Miller (1983) reported that six-­ month-­old infants, but not two-­month-­old infants, could distinguish male from female voices. Around the same period, infants show responses that appear different for adults’ approving or prohibitive vocalizations, even if they are spoken in another language (Fernald, 1993); infants can discriminate happiness, anger, and sadness from the tone of voice (Flom & Bahrick, 2007). In the same study five-­month-­olds were found to achieve chance level for recognizing facial expressions. In fact, several studies have concluded that during the first year of life voice is the primary channel for recognizing emotion, even though infants demonstrate some knowledge of the matching between facial expressions and the corresponding affective vocal expressions (Walker-­Andrews & Lennon, 1991). Accordingly, infants adapt their behavior primarily in response to the affect expressed by their mother’s voice rather than face. For instance, Mumme, Fernald, and Herrera (1996) showed that twelve-­month-­olds interacted more with a novel toy if their mother orally expressed a positive rather than negative emotion. By contrast, facial expressions did not influence the child’s behavior. The earliest development of voice recognition skills compared to face recognition could be explained by several factors. First, during fetal development the auditory system is stimulated earlier than the visual system, giving a head start to vocal perception skills. Second, in the context of an immature orienting system, auditory processing becomes more relevant than visual processing in many contexts, when the interacting person is not directly in the field of view. Lastly, the evolutionary importance of expression of emotion from voice likely contributes to why voice processing or at least affective voice processing develops earlier than face processing in ontogeny.

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M.-­H. Grosbras and P. Belin

Childhood and Adolescence Although babies and toddlers can extract identity, gender, and affective information from voice above chance level, they are still not as proficient as adults. Considerable improvement takes place during childhood and adolescence. Research on this topic is somewhat disjoint from that on infant development because the methods used to study preverbal individuals differ from those used in children, which are more similar to investigations in adults. Although voice is less researched than face perception, developmental studies have indicated that, similar to faces, the development of voice perception is different from the development of perception of other, nonsocial stimuli. Also, children perform well at tasks directly testing voice recognition. In an early study by Bartholomeus (1973), four-­year-­old children were at 57 percent correct at recognizing (free naming) their kindergarten classmates from hearing their voice (compared with 68 percent for the teachers). They performed far better with face recognition (97 percent for children, 100 percent for adults). Not much was done in this research domain in the following years, when efforts focused on the nature and development of children’s linguistic representations. The implicit conclusion was that little change took place after age four with regards to processing of paralinguistic information from voices. Yet studies using more controlled designs and populations have demonstrated that identity recognition based on voices continues to improve during school years. Creel and Jimenez (2012) observed that children aged three to six years were better than chance when discriminating between speakers, even when the speakers were close in terms of their voice acoustic parameters, but the children were still far worse than adults (60 percent versus 90 percent correct responses). Mann, Diamond, and Carey (1979) showed that the recognition of recently learned voices improved from age six to ten, followed by a dip in performance during early adolescence before attainment of adult capacity by age fourteen. This was confirmed with a similar task using monosyllabic words instead of sentences. Levi and Schwartz (2013) showed that children (aged seven to nine years) performed worse than early adolescents (aged ten to twelve years), who were themselves not as good as adults. The emerging picture is thus that preschoolers but also school-­aged children are less proficient than adults at mapping fine-­grained voice features

Development of Voice Perception in the Human Brain 7

to individuals. Nevertheless, for more salient distinctions—­such as male versus female speakers, or child versus adult voices—­adult-­level performance is achieved much earlier (Creel & Jimenez, 2012). Interestingly, no own-­age bias was reported, similar to what has been described for faces in this age range (Macchi Cassia, Pisacane, & Gava, 2012). Affective state recognition from voice also improves considerably during childhood. The recognition of basic emotions from the tone of voice in sentences improves between five and ten years of age (Boucher, Lewis, & Collis, 2000; Cohen, Prather, Town, & Hynd, 1990; Friend, 2000; Sauter, Panattoni, & Happé, 2013; Van Lancker, Cornelius, & Kreiman, 1989). This is also the case when using meaningless sentences, single words (Matsumoto & Kishimoto, 1983), or nonverbal interjections or vocal bursts (Allgood & Heaton, 2015; Grosbras, Ross, & Belin, 2018; Sauter et al., 2013) as stimuli. This development is delayed compared with recognition of affective intent from music and from development of linguistic comprehension. This suggests a maturational trajectory distinct from language and from general emotion comprehension development. Rather, it seems related to a specific tuning of vocal cues decoding with age. It continues also during adolescence, until about fifteen years of age, with parallel trajectories for boys and girls (figure 1.1A) (Grosbras et al., 2018; Chronaki, Hadwin, Garner, Maurage, & Sonuga-­Barke, 2015; Morningstar, Ly, Feldman, & Dirks, 2018). This developmental time line is comparable to what has been described from the literature on face perception (Herba & Phillips, 2004; Wade, Lawrence, Mandy, & Skuse, 2006). Also, studies directly comparing the two modalities in children have suggested—­contrary to what has been observed in infants—­an advantage of the face channel for recognizing identity (Bartholomeus, 1973) or emotion (Gil, Aguert, Le Bigot, Lacroix, & Laval, 2014; Nowicki & Mitchell, 1998; Zupan, 2015), similar to that observed in adults. Furthermore, if lexical (Friend, 2000) or contextual information including facial expression (Gil et al., 2014) is present, children aged three to nine years rely more on this information than on prosody to decipher the affective state of people. In summary, the ability to extract information about the speaker’s identity or emotion continues to mature until adolescence, after a significant amount of exposure to both familiar and novel voices. This resembles what has been described for the ability to extract the same information from faces. This late refinement of social perception is in line with social

8

M.-­H. Grosbras and P. Belin

B

RH 5.0

80

TVA

60

Boys Girls

40 6.9

9.4

11.9

14.3

% BOLD signal change

Percent correct responses

A 100

0.5

children

adolescents

2.03 p