​​​​​Talk from  Holly Rayson – Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Lyon

Short abstract:​​

Facial expressions are central to early social interactions, yet how infants perceive and encode these cues remains unclear. This talk explores the neural mechanisms underlying infant facial expression processing, with a focus on the role of early social experience in shaping these representations. Using EEG and representational similarity analysis (RSA), we examine how infants at 9 and 30 months encode different facial features and whether maternal mirroring influences the development of these representations. Findings suggest that early interactions play a crucial role in structuring the neural encoding of facial expressions, with potential implications for theories of visuomotor matching, reinforcement learning, and predictive processing in infancy. The discussion will highlight how these insights contribute to our understanding of the developmental origins of social cognition and propose new directions for investigating the dynamics of face-space organization in preverbal infants.​​

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