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Poster B132 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Neural development of social perception: Evidence from voxel-wise encoding model study in young children and adults
Elizabeth Jiwon Im1 (), Angira Shirahatti1, Leyla Isik1; 1Johns Hopkins University
From early in life, children exhibit sophisticated social perception and reasoning skills, but our understanding of the brain development behind these skills remains limited. To explore this, we analyzed fMRI data from children and adults as they viewed a socially engaging, animated film. The film was annotated with visual (motion energy) and social-affective features (faces, social interactions, theory of mind (ToM) events, valence, arousal). By training a voxel-wise encoding model on these features, we find that both visual and social features could predict brain activity in children as young as three, especially in areas along the lateral occipital cortex, including the motion-sensitive MT and superior temporal sulcus (STS). Additionally, we conducted individual social feature encoding model and find that faces and social interaction information are present in children as young as three years old. This study uniquely connects child brain activity to social visual information in a naturalistic setting, indicating that children's rich perceptions of social interactions are underpinned by neural mechanisms that develop early in life.
Keywords: fMRI development encoding model social interaction