Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is known that affective touch leads to broad cortical activations including posterior STS, key region of the so-cial brain. Our goal is to discover if a similar pattern of activation can be observed in 5-months-old infants, or whether thedevelopment of this cortical specialization results from extensive postnatal experience.Over two studies we used functional-Near-InfraRed-Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to compare social touch (a human caress) tonon-social touch (a caress performed with a spoon in study1 -n=22- or with an electric toothbrush in study2 -n=17-).In study1 we found similar patterns of activation to the social and non-social stimulus. In study2 we report broad responsesto the non-social stimulus, but, to our surprise, we found no activations to the human caress.In light of these results we conclude that it is possible that at this age discrimination between social and non-social touch inthe posterior temporal lobe is still undergoing specialization.