Changing Brains, Changing Perspectives

Abstract

Adolescence is characterized by the emergence of advanced forms of social perspective taking and significant changes in social behavior. Yet little is known about how changes in social cognition are related to changes in brain function during adolescence. In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of social behavior during three phases of adolescence, carrying out functional magnetic resonance imaging of participants' brains while they were Player 2 in the Trust Game. We found that with age, adolescents were increasingly sensitive to the perspective of the other player, as indicated by their reciprocal behavior. These advanced forms of social perspective-taking behavior were associated with increased involvement of the left temporo-parietal junction and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, young adolescents showed more activity in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, a region previously associated with self-oriented processing and mentalizing. These findings suggest that the asynchronous development of these neural systems may underlie the shift from thinking about self to thinking about the other.

Functional connectivity in the social brain across childhood and adolescence

“…Indeed, a growing body of work has revealed a collection of brain regions which are robustly active when thinking about or making decisions regarding others (Brothers, 1990; Saxe, 2006; Dunbar and Shultz, 2007; Frith and Frith, 2007; Lieberman, 2007; Adolphs, 2009; van Overwalle, 2009), and patterns of activation in these regions continue to be refined across late childhood and adolescence (e.g. Blakemore et al , 2007; Burnett et al , 2009; van den Bos et al , 2011; Gweon et al , 2012; Mills et al , 2014; Van Hoorn et al , 2016). However, previous methodologies used to probe the social brain have not evaluated the social brain as a ‘network’.…”

“…Decety and Lamm, 2007), previous developmental work employing univariate methodologies consistently supports the recruitment of social brain regions in tasks that require social cognition from childhood into adulthood (e.g. Blakemore et al , 2007; Burnett et al , 2009; van den Bos et al , 2011; Gweon et al , 2012; Schurz et al , 2014; van Hoorn et al , 2016). …”

“…reciprocity, TPJ only [van den Bos et al , 2011]; being observed by peers, mPFC only [Somerville et al , 2013]), which questions the individual contributions of each region within the larger social brain network. More recent advances have started to investigate functional connectivity between social brain regions and affective or cognitive control regions (e.g.…”

“…In each of these analyses, we tested for potential linear and curvilinear developmental changes in the functional architecture of the social brain network, given previous evidence that activation in social brain regions changes across development (e.g. Blakemore et al , 2007; Burnett et al , 2009; van den Bos et al , 2011; Gweon et al , 2012; van Hoorn et al , 2016; reviewed in Blakemore and Mills, 2014; Nelson et al , 2016). Together, our multi-method approach leveraged the different strengths of each type of analysis to provide a comprehensive assessment of the social brain’s functional architecture.…”

Cognitive and emotional empathy in typically developing children: The influence of age, gender, and intelligence

“…In addition, functional brain imaging studies have shown a differential development of neural networks comprising the social brain throughout childhood and adolescence (Blakemore, 2008;Decety, 2010). With regard to cognitive and emotional empathy (Decety & Michalska, 2009), age-related changes in the activation of underlying neural structures were found in fMRI studies (van den Bos, van Dijk, Westenberg, Rombouts, & Crone, 2011). Several behavioural studies concentrating on single aspects of cognitive empathy indicated improvement in emotion recognition (Herba, Landau, Russell, Ecker, & Phillips, 2006;Williams et al, 2009) and perspective taking (Aldrich, Tenenbaum, Brooks, Harrison, & Sines, 2011;Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011) with age.…”