Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)

Speaker: Lindsey Powell, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego

Host: Dr. Rebecca Saxe

Talk title: Experiencing and understanding prosocial motivations in infancy and early childhood

Abstract: Human prosociality is critical for both individuals and societies to thrive. In the first two years of life, infants begin both to engage in prosocial behavior and to recognize and evaluate the prosocial actions of others. In the first part of the talk, I will describe an fNIRS study investigating the neural correlates of helping behavior in 14- to 20-month-old toddlers. We find that responses in brain regions associated with adult feelings of empathic concern and distress (MPFC, SII), measured while participants watch videos of an actor in mild distress, are correlated with toddlers' helping behavior. In the second part of the talk, I will describe a series of studies aimed at investigating how infants and children reason about others' prosocial motivations, with a focus on their representations of affiliative relationships.