Developmental shifts in social cognition: socio-emotional biases across the lifespan in rhesus monkeys

Humans exhibit a suite of developmental changes in social cognition across the lifespan. To what extent are these developmental patterns unique? We first review several social domains in which humans undergo critical ontogenetic changes in socio-cognitive processing, including social attention and theory of mind. We then examine whether one human developmental transition—a shift in socioemotional preferences—also occurs in nonhuman primates. Specifically, we experimentally measured socioemotional processing in a large population of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) ranging from infancy to old age. We tested whether macaques, like humans, also exhibited developmental shifts from a negativity bias at younger ages, indicating preferential attention to negative socioemotional stimuli, to a positivity bias at older ages. We first assessed monkeys’ (n = 337) responses to negative socioemotional stimuli by comparing their duration of looking towards photos of negative conspecific signals (threa...

人类在整个生命周期中，社会认知会呈现一系列发育性变化。这些发育模式究竟具有多大程度的独特性？我们首先综述了人类社会认知加工中存在关键个体发育变化的若干社会领域，包括社会注意与心理理论（theory of mind）。随后我们探究，人类的某一项发育转变——即社会情绪偏好的转变——是否同样存在于非人灵长类动物中。具体而言，我们通过实验对涵盖从幼年到老年的大样本恒河猴（Macaca mulatta）群体的社会情绪加工能力进行了测量。我们测试了恒河猴是否与人类一样，同样存在发育转变：幼年时表现出负面偏差（即优先关注负面社会情绪刺激），而在年长后转为正面偏差。我们首先通过比较337只（n = 337）恒河猴对同类负面信号（威胁……）照片的注视时长，评估了它们对负面社会情绪刺激的反应。