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This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Medicine --- Neurology & clinical neurophysiology --- TBI --- ABI --- Behavior --- Social Cognition --- Neuropsychiatry --- TBI --- ABI --- Behavior --- Social Cognition --- Neuropsychiatry

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This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Medicine --- Neurology & clinical neurophysiology --- TBI --- ABI --- Behavior --- Social Cognition --- Neuropsychiatry

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

situated embodied social cognition --- cognitivism --- enactivism --- sensori-motor simulation --- representation

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Over the past three decades mounting evidence has suggested that infants’ social perceptual and social cognitive abilities are considerably richer than was once thought. By the end of the second year of life, infants discriminate faces along various social dimensions, attend to and understand others’ goals and intentions, use the emotions of others to guide their learning and behavior, attribute dispositional characteristics to other agents, and make basic social evaluations. What has also become clear is that there is a great deal of variability in infants’ social perception and cognition. A critical, outstanding question concerns the nature and meaning of such variability. The proposed Research Topic welcomes papers addressing cutting-edge questions regarding variability and individual differences in early social perception and social cognition. The goal of these papers is to investigate overarching questions in this domain, which are necessary to move the field forward. Variability in early social perception and social cognition (among other domains) in infancy and early childhood is often attributed to noise, or overlooked in favor of focusing on age-related changes. Yet, recent work suggests that variability in social perceptual and social cognitive tasks reliably inter-relates, and predicts real-world social behaviors. For example, infants’ everyday experience with different face categories predicts individual differences in face processing, infants’ production of goal-directed actions predicts their simultaneous understanding of these actions, and variability in social attention during the second year of life is related to theory of mind during the preschool years. These findings suggest that variability in performance on social perception and social cognition tasks is not merely a nuisance variable, but, rather, may provide the key to addressing significant questions regarding the nature of infants’ social perception and social cognition, and the processes that underlie developmental change. Acknowledging and closely examining and investigating variability in early social perceptual and social cognitive abilities may represent a powerful approach for understanding development in (at least) two ways. First, variability can signal transitional points in the developmental onset of a given ability. Thus, such variability, and the extent to which variability relates to experience and/or other abilities, can be used to test hypotheses regarding mechanisms that underlie developmental changes. Second, variability can represent more enduring individual differences between infants. In this case, critical questions arise regarding the source of individual differences (that is, what factors shape the emergence of individual differences?) and whether such early individual differences contribute to the development of more advanced and sophisticated forms of social cognition and behavior. The goal of this Research Topic will be to encourage researchers to take variability in early social perception and cognition seriously. Papers that give variability center stage, and are aimed at addressing the value of variability for identifying developmental mechanisms, as well as investigating the existence, source, and antecedents of early individual differences in social perception and social cognition are welcomed. Taken together, the contributed papers will provide integral new information to the study of social perception and social cognition over the first three years of life.

Cognition in infants. --- infant cognition --- social cognition --- developmental mechanisms --- individual differences --- social perception --- infant cognition --- social cognition --- developmental mechanisms --- individual differences --- social perception

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Attachment is a biologically emotion regulation based system guiding cognitive and emotional processes with respect to intimate and significant relationships. Secure relationships promote infants’ exploration of the world and expand their mastery of the environment. Adverse attachment experiences like, maltreatment, loss, and separation have long been known to have enduring unfavorable effects on human mental health. Research on the neurobiological basis of attachment started with animal studies focusing on emotional deprivation and its behavioral, molecular and endocrine consequences. The present book presents an interdisciplinary synthesis of existing knowledge and new perspectives on the human neuroscience of attachment, showing the tremendous development of this field. The following chapters include innovative studies that are representative of the broad spectrum of current approaches. These involve both differing neurobiological types of substrates using measures like fMRI, EEG, psychophysiology, endocrine parameters, and genetic polymorphisms, as well as psychometric approaches to classify attachment patterns in individuals. The findings we have acquired in the meanwhile on the neural substrates of attachment in healthy subjects lay the foundation of studies with clinical groups. The final section of the book addresses evidence on changes in the functioning of these neural substrates in psychopathology.

fMRI --- Neuroscience --- social cognition --- Brain activity --- EEG --- Genetics --- Attachment --- Attachment representation --- Psychopathology --- Neurophysiology --- fMRI --- Neuroscience --- social cognition --- Brain activity --- EEG --- Genetics --- Attachment --- Attachment representation --- Psychopathology --- Neurophysiology