Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans are profoundly social creatures. We depend on others for survival and crave social interactions. Faces are thegateway to many typical social interactions. One of the most replicable results in cognitive neuroscience is the selectiveresponse of some cortical regions to faces in humans and other social primates. Specifically, the fusiform face area (FFA)is a region in the ventral temporal cortex (VTC) that is selectively responsive to faces. To determine whether infantsshow early cortical responses to faces, we recruited 86 human infants (2.1-11.9 months) to participate in an awake infantfunctional resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. We obtained usable fMRI data from 49 infants (2.1-9.7 months) whilethey watched videos of faces, bodies, objects, and scenes, 30 of whom (2.5-9.4 months) had enough data for a functionalregion of interest (fROI) analysis. A group random effects analysis revealed significantly higher responses to faces thanobjects in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), ventral temporal cortex (VTC), andsubcortical areas of the infant brain. Additionally, the fROI analysis revealed face selective responses in the STS, MPFC,and VTC but not lateral occipital cortex or subcortical areas of the infant brain. Thus, we provide the first evidence offace selective responses in the infant brain and demonstrate that social regions (STS and MPFC) respond selectively at thesame time as perceptual regions (VTC).