PLEASE NOTE: Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive
early to ensure you get a seat. The talk will begin promptly at 5.
The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by:
Jukka Leppanen, University of Tampere
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 5 PM
Location: CEU Cognitive Development Center, Hattyś u. 14, 3rd floor
The 7-month transition in attention to social signals of emotion
Cross-species evidence suggests that the onset of locomotion and
explorations away from the mother early in life is associated with
functional maturation of emotion-related neural circuitry and behavioral
sensitivity to danger-alerting cues. In human infants, these
developmental changes in emotion-processing may occur during the second
half of the first year when infants begin to exhibit preferential
attention to social signals of fear. My talk will discuss this argument
by reviewing i) studies examining the neural bases and nature of
infants' attentional bias towards social signals of fear; ii) studies
that have begun to link genetic variations in brain function with
fear-processing in human infants; and iii) preliminary data suggesting
that individual variations in early perceptual biases towards emotional
cues may be relevant for predicting typical and atypical emotional
traits later in life.
Cognitive Science events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events