Figure 1

Experimental task (a). Both adults and infants are passively presented with an audiovisual sequence of stimuli including a cue (C) and a stimulus (S). The cue consisted of the synchronized presentation of a central “bull’s eye” acting as visual attention getter together with an auditory stimulus. According to experimental conditions, this could be a human female voice speaking Italian words (e.g.,/ciao/) or an inanimate object sound (e.g.,/bruum/), hence creating a social or nonsocial predictive context. After a fixed interval of 1500 ms, the cue is always followed by the display of a central picture on the monitor, which can be either an emotionally neutral, female face (social condition) or a rag ball (nonsocial condition). The cue-stimulus association is kept constant throughout the whole task, with human voices always predicting faces and sounds always predicting objects. Experimental design (b). At the beginning of the experiment, each participant underwent a learning phase in which the C-S sequence was presented sequentially and seamlessly eight times per category to induce associative learning between social and nonsocial items. After this, in the test phase, a fixed 1500 ms interval is embedded in the C-S sequence to elicit anticipatory neural activity before the onset of the stimulus.