About this Research Topic
This Research Topic aims at presenting recent researches in the fields of social cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and developmental robotics, which study the interplay between physical and social cognition at the brain and/or the body level and the construction of sensorimotor circuits through physical and social interactions. Social interactions are deeply rooted to the physical world. For instance, it is known from the works of Piaget and of neo-Piagetians that infants are particularly sensitive to temporal events (contingency detection, timing, rhythm and synchrony) that occur during physical interactions and also during social interactions; e.g., infants learn to 'detect' and 'tune' their dynamics to the dynamics of others. Meanwhile, in cognitive neuroscience, neural mechanisms relying on synchrony and on contingency detectors (temporal integration) are relatively common in the brain. This Research Topic is intended for an inter-disciplinary audience and attempts to provide an equal exposure between experimental observations, robotics, theoretical and computational neuroscience models.
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