The first year represents an exceptional time of development during which important social skills emerge, like action and emotion understanding. However, to date, no study explored the neural underpinnings of infants’ ability to bind emotion- to action-related information. To assess this issue, we measured EEG activity while 6-month-old infants observed the same action performed by an actress displaying three different emotional expressions (happiness, anger and neutral). Results have shown that actions embedded in an emotional context (happiness and anger) elicited larger early negativity at parieto-occipital sites compared to a neutral context. This finding suggests that already at 6 months of age, infants use information coming from facial expressions to detect the saliency and relevance of others’ actions.

第一年代表了一个特殊的发展时期，在此期间会出现重要的社交技能，如行动和情感理解。然而，迄今为止，还没有研究探讨婴儿将情绪与行动相关信息结合起来的能力的神经基础。为了评估这个问题，我们测量了 EEG 活动，同时 6 个月大的婴儿观察了一位女演员表现出三种不同情绪表达（快乐、愤怒和中性）的相同动作。结果表明，与中性环境相比，嵌入在情绪环境（快乐和愤怒）中的行为会在顶枕部引起更大的早期消极情绪。这一发现表明，在 6 个月大的时候，婴儿就可以使用来自面部表情的信息来检测他人行为的显着性和相关性。