Child and Animal Learning Development

This study uses fNIRS to track brain responses to social stimuli in infants over five years, finding age-dependent specialisation in auditory social processing.

This study assesses the feasibility of using an asynchronous online platform to study neonatal mimicry of caregivers, finding preliminary evidence against mimicry of tongue protrusions and inconclusive results for mouth openings.

This study investigates preferences in observational learning, finding that participants prefer low-noise individuals and that learning styles influence partner selection in social learning.

This paper presents a computational theory of infant gaze based on rational information gathering, showing that gaze preference is nonmonotonic with exposure due to the interplay of stimulus informativeness and future utility.

The paper presents longitudinal fNIRS data on habituation and novelty detection in infants from The Gambia and UK, showing distinct developmental patterns across age and cultural contexts.

This study links pupil responses to social stimuli with adaptive behaviors in infants aged 6-24 months using SESAMI and pupillometry.

This study tests object permanence in domestic cats using visible and invisible displacement tasks, finding that cats show different behaviors based on person familiarity and trial type.

This study shows that expectancy violations can be as effective as complex mentalizing in novel communication, with faster reaction times and comparable accuracy.

The paper investigates how endogenous oscillatory rhythms and interactive contingencies influence infant attention during caregiver-infant interactions, finding that intrinsic cognitive processes, not caregiver behaviors, primarily control attention.

The paper links infant EEG microstate D/4 duration to attentional control during play, showing associations with joint attention and sustained attention.

This study shows neonate animals use innate biases for generalisation, consistent with a Bayesian model, without relying on experience or reinforcement.

This study investigates the overlap between neural correlates of theory of mind and semantic cognition using a meta-analysis of 344 functional neuroimaging studies, finding significant overlap in the anterior temporal lobe and temporoparietal junction.

The paper examines the link between parent attention-orienting behavior and neural entropy in 8-month-old infants during social interactions.

This study compares gaze patterns and brain activations in humans and marmosets during ToM and Random Frith-Happe animations, finding similar processing differences.

The paper investigates neural activity during economic games and false-belief tasks, finding overlapping activation and connectivity in social cognition regions.

The paper examines the relationship between language processing and theory of mind (ToM) using fMRI, finding that language network responses to ToM tasks are largely due to linguistic confounds rather than neural overlap.

This study uses fMRI to show that ventrolateral anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is involved in social cognition through semantic processing, not as a domain-specific social module.

The paper investigates how language and Theory of Mind networks track linguistic and mental state content in naturalistic stimuli using fMRI.

The paper identifies a brain region in Rhesus macaques that shows computational properties similar to the human temporo-parietal junction, modulated by social interaction predictability.

This study uses fMRI to show the human brain encodes others' attention as either exogenous or endogenous, distinguishing self from other agents.

This study investigates whether newborns show attentional bias toward objects with speed changes, suggesting a foundational mechanism for animacy perception.

The paper shows that cooperative social learning improves with age, while uncooperative learning remains stable, highlighting early adolescence as a critical period for social behavior development.

This study compares self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication, finding that participants accurately infer others' confidence levels as they do their own.

This study examines cortical temporal hierarchy development in middle childhood, finding reduced long timescale processing in key brain regions and its link to social-cognitive abilities.

The paper investigates how the brain manages multiple mental states in working memory and links this ability to social integration through neural activity in the dorsomedial default network.

The paper identifies brain regions and connectivity patterns associated with the development of meta-ignorance in preschoolers.

This study shows 6-7-year-olds can combine sensory cues with learned regularities statistically efficiently, but task complexity affects their performance more than adults.

This study shows 24-month-olds integrate observations, priors, and agent information to build predictive models of others' actions, as measured by pupillary responses and explained by a computational model.

The paper introduces a neuropsychological coding framework to analyze adult-infant play patterns across sensorimotor, cognitive, and socio-emotional dimensions, demonstrating its ability to distinguish playful from non-playful interactions.