Development of Predictive Responses in Social Brain Regions From Early to Middle Childhood

• In Event: 3-229 - The Role of Middle Childhood in Social-Cognitive Development: New Evidence From Behavioral and Neural Studies

Integrative Statement

When we watch movies or listen to stories, we consider the mental states of the characters in order to understand the narrative and to predict what will happen next. This kind of reasoning relies on our “Theory of Mind” (ToM) – our intuitive theory that links actions to beliefs, goals, and emotions – and engages a specific network of brain regions, including bilateral temporoparietal junction, precuneus, and dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003).

Recent fMRI studies of adults have suggested that ToM brain regions not only infer, but also actively predict, mental states. For example, ToM brain regions respond more when processing unexpected actions of an agent, given priors about that agent’s mind and mental states (Dungan, Stepanovic, & Young, 2016; Theriault & Young, 2017). Additionally, these same brain regions use current mental state information (i.e., emotions) to predict future emotional states (Thornton & Tamir, 2017). Finally, responses in ToM regions to a story (audio) narrative were shifted earlier in time in participants who had previously watched a movie version of the same narrative, suggesting that these participants anticipated upcoming events during the second (audio) presentation of the narrative (Baldassano et al., 2016). These findings are consistent with a predictive coding framework (Koster-Hale & Saxe, 2013; Tamir & Thornton, 2018), in which large neural responses are dedicated to unpredicted, novel stimuli, and predictable stimuli evoke reduced responses.

Are predictive responses a neural signature of ToM development? The current experiment aimed to measure the development of these predictive responses in children. Young (3 – 4 years old, n=30) and older (6 – 7 years old, n=32) children watched “Partly Cloudy” twice while undergoing fMRI. “Partly Cloudy” is a short and engaging movie that evokes responses in ToM brain regions (Richardson, Lisandrelli, Riobueno-Naylor, & Saxe, 2018). We find that as children get older, ToM brain regions are recruited earlier in time during the second presentation of the movie. This "narrative anticipation" effect is specific: we do not find an anticipation effect, or signs of a developing anticipation effect, in a control network of brain regions that responds just as robustly to the movie (the “Pain Matrix”). Together, these results suggest that ToM brain regions make active predictions about other people's thoughts and feelings, and that as children get older, their ToM brain regions are faster to make such predictions.

Authors

• Hilary Richardson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
  Non-Presenting Author