Mapping Functional Brain Development: Building a Social Brain Through Interactive Specialization

Abstract

The authors review a viewpoint on human functional brain development, interactive specialization (IS), and its application to the emerging network of cortical regions referred to as the social brain. They advance the IS view in 2 new ways. First, they extend IS into a domain to which it has not previously been applied-the emergence of social cognition and mentalizing computations in the brain. Second, they extend the implications of the IS view from the emergence of specialized functions within a cortical region to a focus on how different cortical regions with complementary functions become orchestrated into networks during human postnatal development. © 2009 American Psychological Association.