Parent-infant neural connectedness and early social learning

Dr Victoria Leong, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) & University of Cambridge (UK)

Thursday 17 January 2019

During early life, social interactions between infants and caregivers provide a powerful stimulant for learning. Yet current neuroscience frameworks are ill-equipped to explain how social interactions potentiate learning in the infant brain. Social learning is the ability to learn vicariously through observation of others’ behaviour and via social interactions without requiring direct experience. Human mastery of such “second-personal social relations” has propelled the rise of our species through cultural intelligence. However, the social transmission of knowledge is challenging – information may be incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, requiring the recipient to weight the relevance of the source as well as the message. Early social learning, therefore, is better understood as a negotiation between teacher and learner as they perform a mental dance around what (if any) learning will occur. Explaining this capricious, but fundamental, form of early human learning requires a paradigmatically different type of “two-person” neuroscience. Here, I will present dyadic (adult-infant) neural data that exemplify a co-constructivist approach to understanding how infants learn from their social partners.

Forty-seven mother-infant dyads (aged 10.7 months) participated in a social learning task whilst their neural signals were concurrently measured using dual-EEG. Mothers demonstrated positive or negative emotion toward novel toys and infants’ learning over 16 trials was measured. Results revealed that dissociable interpersonal and intra-infant neural circuits differentially underpinned whether infants showed learning, as distinct from what infants learned. Stronger mother-infant interpersonal connectivity predicted a higher likelihood of social learning, whereas higher intra-personal connectivity predicted positively-valenced learning by infants. Further, increased dyadic (interpersonal) connectivity across consecutive trials triggered successful corrections in learning, whereas decreased dyadic connectivity was associated with learning reversal. Finally, greater use of ostensive signals (eye contact and prolonged speech) increased dyadic connectivity and pedagogical success. These results demonstrate that neural connectedness between parents and their children crucially supports social learning during early life.