Journal Article

The Predictive Nature of Individual Differences in Early Associative Learning and Emerging Social Behavior

Reeb-Sutherland, Bethany C., Fox, Nathan A., Levitt, Pat

2012

Overview

Across the first year of life, infants achieve remarkable success in their ability to interact in the social world. The hierarchical nature of circuit and skill development predicts that the emergence of social behaviors may depend upon an infant's early abilities to detect contingencies, particularly socially-relevant associations. Here, we examined whether individual differences in the rate of associative learning at one month of age is an enduring predictor of social, imitative, and discriminative behaviors measured across the human infant's first year. One-month learning rate was predictive of social behaviors at 5, 9, and 12 months of age as well as face-evoked discriminative neural activity at 9 months of age. Learning was not related to general cognitive abilities. These results underscore the importance of early contingency learning and suggest the presence of a basic mechanism underlying the ontogeny of social behaviors.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Age / Association Learning - physiology / Associative learning / Babies / Behavior / Bipolar disorder / Child & adolescent psychiatry / Child Development - physiology / Cognition - physiology / Cognitive ability / Communication / Conditioning, Eyelid - physiology / Contingency / Cooperation / Early childhood education / Female / Human behavior / Humans / Imitative Behavior - physiology / Individuality / Infant / Infant Behavior - physiology / Infant Behavior - psychology / Infant, Newborn / Infants / Learning / Learning Curve / Male / Medicine / Motor Activity - physiology / Neurosciences / Ontogeny / Predictive Value of Tests / Psychological Tests / Schizophrenia / Social and Behavioral Sciences / Social aspects / Social Behavior / Social discrimination learning