Specialized Brain for the Social Vision: Perspectives from Typical and Atypical Development

Information derived from the face, and especially from the eye region, serves a number of different functions in social interaction, such as triggering a reflexive shift of an observer’s visual attention (Driver et al., 1999; Friesen and Kingstone, 1998 and Hietanen, 1999), regulating turn-taking in conversation (Argyle & Cook, 1976), expressing intimacy (Kleinke, 1986, Langton et al., 2000), and inferring mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Recent behavioural studies in adults have demonstrated that direct gaze can modulate other aspects of face processing. For example, perceived eye contact can affect both the speed of online gender face judgments and the accuracy of incidental recognition memory of faces (Vuilleumier et al., 2005), and performance in face memory tasks can be influenced by gaze direction both at the encoding and at the retrieval levels (Hood, Macrae, Cole-Davies, & Dias, 2003). Applying the Interactive Specialization approach Johnson et al. (2005) predicted that during infancy the social brain network will not yet have clearly emerged from surrounding brain regions and networks. Furthermore, during infancy and early childhood the social brain network will emerge as a whole, and not in a region-by-region (maturation of modules) manner and that later infancy and early childhood specialization within the social brain network will occur with different patterns of regional activation for different tasks (e.g. eye gaze processing may become partially distinct from general face processing). Finally the atypical development, following this approach can be considered as a lack of specialization of, or within, the social brain network. The lack of specialization may account for some of the cognitive and behavioral symptoms observed in certain developmental disorders. Atypical development could also result in deviant patterns of specialization.