Mental representations of persons. Neurobiological basis and early childhood development

In the present article, a neurophysiologically based systematic on the functional components and development of mental representations of persons is proposed. Each of three lines of research are reviewed on two levels. The first level selects relevant findings in the areas of neurology, neurobiology and neuroimaging so as to outline the cerebral substrates of mental representations of the self and significant other persons, face selective neurons, and mentalizing parts of person representations (theory of mind). On the second level, evidence from developmental research is detailed to cover the early childhood time course of face recognition, mirror-image self-recognition, the antecedents and constitution of attachment representation, as well as language acquisition of mental state terms. The paper concludes by presenting a strategy to investigate steps in brain-behavior relations in the domain of mental representations of persons. This is suggested to be achieved by linking hitherto unconnected domains of research in the areas outlined.