Neurocognitive Development of Interpreting Communicative Intent in Youth

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Abstract

Humans possess a remarkable ability to infer the unstated intent of others from communicative signals, such as verbal or text messages. While recent studies have made progress in understanding its neural mechanisms, relatively little is known about when and how humans acquire the ability to attribute intentions of others during interpersonal communication. The challenge relates to not only the inherent complexity in human communication and individual variations in development, but also the lack of quantitative instruments to probe the complex cognitive process underlying communication in a principled way and formally characterize the neurodevelopmental trajectory without resorting to reverse inferences. Here, we address this challenge by combining tools and methods from developmental psychology, model-based fMRI, and computational pragmatics, to investigate the neural and cognitive changes related to communicative signal interpretation from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data.

The study contains experiments on 3 datasets, including (i) an fMRI experiment on individuals of 8-24 years old (N = 141), (ii) a behavioral replication experiment on an independent sample of youths (N = 175, ages 7-17), and (iii) a 1.7-year follow-up experiment on part of the fMRI subjects (N = 54). Across these experiments, subjects participated in a well-established Referential Communication Game as signal receivers, where they needed to recover a target item in a given context based on a referring expression selected by a signal sender.

The ability of communicative signal interpretation, as measured by the rate of successfully recovering the intended referents of the signal sender, continuously develops from the middle childhood into adulthood. Leveraging a well-established computational model previously used for examining the neural substrates of communication in adults, we deconstruct the communicative inferential process into several sub-operations, and show that the overall age-related improvements are supported by changes in these sub-operations and the related neural signals. These include (i) an adolescent-nonspecific increase in the engagement of mental simulation of signal senders, subserved by functional changes in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and (ii) an adolescent-specific development in the sensitivity to contextual saliency, subserved by functional changes in regions including the sensory cortex. Importantly, the relative behavioral sensitivity of the two cognitive components is associated with the activation in the frontoparietal network, a set of brain regions widely implicated in executive functions and undergo significant, continuous changes through adolescence into adulthood. These results are confirmed by the replication and longitudinal data at the behavioral level. Together, our findings suggest separable neurodevelopmental trajectories whose interplay contributes to the maturation of the ability to understand other’s unstated intent during social and communicative interactions.

Authors

• Cong Wang, Peking University
  Presenting Author

• Meng-Han Cong, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Qingtian Mi, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Guihua Yu, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yanjie Su, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lusha Zhu, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author