Adult-to-infant unidirectional neural coupling mediates selective social learning in infants from the United Kingdom and Singapore

Infants possess powerful learning abilities, but their neural resources must be deployed parsimoniously toward the most relevant information in a given social context. Adults curate infants’ information selection through ostensive marking of valuable content using social cues such as eye-contact. However, the neural mechanisms that support social gating of early learning remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate that – in infants from UK and Singapore – unidirectional adult-speaker to infant-listener neural coupling mediates infants’ selection of socially-relevant information for learning. Specifically, speaker-to-listener neural coupling is modulated by the adult speaker’s eye contact and predicts selective learning of an artificial language that is paired with full (compared to partial or no) eye contact. Speaker-to-listener neural coupling is a better predictor of selective learning than infants’ own neural activity, suggesting that this signal effectively captures important social influences on early cognition, and may provide insights into social valuation decision-processes that dictate early social learning. Infants are sensitive to social cues like eye gaze as a signal for learning. Here, the authors show, in cohorts from Singapore and the United Kingdom, coupling of adult and infant brain activity mediates infants’ use of speaker gaze to learn selectively.