Previous studies have shown the earliest observations of brain responses to social human actions were in four-month-old babies, who had already had thousands of face-to-face communications and could have learned to respond to these social stimuli.
However, this new research by Birkbeck Baby Lab at the University of London and the Universita di Padova in Italy, suggests that babies respond to social clues just hours after birth.
Researchers used a technique known as ‘near infra-red spectroscopy’ to measure the brain activity of 24 newborns between 24 and 120 hours after birth.
They found that the strength of the observed response to social cues increased significantly with the number of hours following birth, which they say indicates that face-to-face interactions, even within the first few hours of life, play an important role in the development of the social brain.
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