Rights statement: Copyright: © 2010 Parise et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Final published version, 571 KB, PDF document
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
| Article number | e14208 |
|---|---|
| <mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 3/12/2010 |
| <mark>Journal</mark> | PLoS ONE |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Publication Status | Published |
| <mark>Original language</mark> | English |
An infant's own name is a unique social cue. Infants are sensitive to their own name by 4 months of age, but whether they use their names as a social cue is unknown. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was measured as infants heard their own name or stranger's names and while looking at novel objects. Event related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to names revealed that infants differentiate their own name from stranger names from the first phoneme. The amplitude of the ERPs to objects indicated that infants attended more to objects after hearing their own names compared to another name. Thus, by 5 months of age infants not only detect their name, but also use it as a social cue to guide their attention to events and objects in the world.