Acquiring skills for effective social interaction is critical for infants. This project will examine the early development of brain processes that underpin successful social interactions, and identify factors that affect social functioning. The researchers will investigate social and brain development during the first year of life with a specific focus on the role of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter and hormone implicated in several social behaviors. By revealing how brain biology shapes and interacts with early infant social development, this research will fill an important gap in our knowledge and has broad implications for understanding healthy and atypical development. The project is multidisciplinary in nature as it uses a cutting-edge approach combining epigenetic, neuroscience, and behavioral methods. The findings will be broadly applicable to multiple disciplines and will inform understandings of molecular biology, neuroscience, and social psychology. The planned experiments will provide valuable research opportunities and unique training for students interested in developmental psychology, cognitive science, molecular genetics, and developmental neuroscience.
The human brain undergoes critical development during the first year of life, which allows for the effective processing of social information from faces and voices. This project will test the hypothesis that endogenous oxytocin impacts social information processing during early development by regulating levels of neural noise during face and voice processing. Oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain and plays a critical role in many social behaviors. Oxytocin receptors (OXTR) allow the brain to respond to oxytocin, and their quantity in the brain is variable in the population. The production of these receptors is under epigenetic control, specifically through DNA methylation, and variability in OXTR prevalence is linked to variability in social information processing among adults and to the presence of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. The project will examine whether, from early in development, neural noise plays a predominant role in establishing the salience of social information conveyed by faces and voices, through a process governed by the oxytocin system. To this end, this project will (1) investigate longitudinal changes in neural noise across the first year of life using electroencephalography, (2) assess whether individual differences in neural noise predict social information processing and behavioral outcomes during infancy, and (3) map how epigenetic modifications in the oxytocin system impact levels of neural noise during early development. Studying neural noise in typically developing infants and identifying the processes that contribute to its individual variability will foster a deeper and more mechanistic understanding of early social and brain development.
