https://www.selleckchem.com/products/-epicatechin.html These findings reveal that, in contrast to previous claims, the sense of agency is only beginning to emerge at this age. An important feature of the development of emotion recognition in infants is the emergence of a robust attentional bias for fearful faces. There is some debate about when this enhanced sensitivity to fearful expressions develops. The current study explored whether 3-month-olds demonstrate differential behavioral and neural responding to happy and fearful faces. Three-month-old infants (n = 69) participated in a behavioral task that assessed whether they show a visual preference for fearful faces and an event-related potential (ERP) task that assessed their neural responses to fearful and happy faces. Infants showed a looking preference for fearful over happy faces. They also showed differential neural responding over occiptotemporal regions that have been implicated in face perception (i.e., N290, P400), but not over frontocentral regions that have been implicated in attentional processes (i.e., Nc). These findings suggest that 3-month-olds display an early perceptual sensitivity to fearful faces, which may presage the emergence of the attentional bias for fearful faces in older infants. Tracking the ontogeny of this phenomenon is necessary to understand its relationship with later developmental outcomes. Adolescence may mark a sensitive period for the development of higher-order cognition through enhanced plasticity of cortical circuits. At the same time, animal research indicates that pubertal hormones may represent one key mechanism for closing sensitive periods in the associative neocortex, thereby resulting in decreased plasticity of cortical circuits in adolescence. In the present review, we set out to solve some of the existing ambiguity and examine how hormonal changes associated with pubertal onset may modulate plasticity in higher-order cognition during adolescence. We build on exist