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  • The fundamental challenge scientifically is how to

    2018-11-07

    The fundamental challenge, scientifically, is how to simplify, but not to -simplify. On the one hand, scientific progress requires parsing complexity, ideally into falsifiable hypotheses that can be addressed within well-designed empirical studies. On the other hand, slicing too narrowly is likely to miss important aspects of these multi-faceted developmental processes, unlikely to achieve a depth of understanding of the real-world complexities relevant to the unique risks and opportunities impacting youth during this maturational period.
    Introduction Humans evolved in an environment where integration with the social world was critical for survival. Because many factors moderate social dynamics (e.g., dominance relations, alliance formation, cooperation, deception (de Wall, 1996)), the need to maintain social cohesion under such complex conditions necessitated the dedication of substantial neuronal resources to processing social signals in the environment (Pinker, 2002; Shultz and Dunbar, 2007; Dunbar, 2012). Social cognition, like many complex cognitive processes, is not fully functional at birth, but rather matures slowly across development. One remarkable feature of human social behavior, and one that we believe is a key aspect of normative maturation, is the dramatic change in social focus across development. Social behavior is the culmination of input from many neural networks that mediate different aspects of responding to various classes of social stimuli or contexts (Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012). For example, distinct ABT888 networks have been identified for social processes such as motor mimicry (Gallese et al., 2004), joint attention (Happe and Frith, 2014), mentalizing (Saxe and Baron-Cohen, 2006), empathy (Singer and Lamm, 2009), fairness (Guroglu et al., 2011), social bonding (Insel, 2010), and even deception (Yang et al., 2014). Thus, the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior do not reflect a single “social brain”, but rather distinct neural circuits that are implicated in fundamentally different and dissociable functional brain processes that evolve and adapt to the social demands of a given environment and a specific phase of development. In a previous review on adolescent neurodevelopment, we argued that the brain processes governing social behavior could be parsed into three broad functional clusters or nodes: the perceptual node; the affective node; and the cognitive-regulatory node (Nelson et al., 2005). This provided a framework for mapping changes in social behavior during adolescence onto maturational changes that take place in the brain. The present paper has two primary goals. The first is to expand the scope of this social re-orientation perspective beyond adolescence to encompass a number of other inflection points in social development. The second is to update the empirical evidence described in the original review and highlight important gaps that need to be addressed in future work.
    Beyond adolescence: other periods of social re-orientation We believe at least five distinct social phases occur in development, each of which can be largely defined by the social target and type of social behavior expressed. During infancy, sociality primarily consists of engagement with the mother/caregiver. In the juvenile phase between weaning and puberty, the mother–infant dyad is gradually replaced with peer-focused play behavior, while maintaining the mother/caregiver as a base. In the adolescent phase between puberty and full maturity, social behavior transitions to full integration with larger groups of peers. This transitions into the reproductive/intimacy phase, which is accompanied by social bonding and reproductive behavior. Finally, in the mature adult phase, social behavior is characterized by interactions within a relatively stable multigenerational group, with the expression of intimate relations, and directed care of offspring. Although this developmental pattern is not universal, it is widely expressed among most primates and in many socially living mammalian species (Hinde and Spencer-Booth, 1967; Biben, 1983; Panksepp et al., 1984; Pusey and Packer, 1987; Spinka et al., 2001; Ekernas and Cords, 2007; Konner, 2010; Zhang et al., 2012). We believe the conservation of this pattern of social phases across development likely indicates that the brain plays an important role in shaping maximally adaptive social behavior.