Functional connectivity in the social brain across childhood and adolescence

McCormick, Ethan M.; Hoorn, Jorien van; Cohen, Jessica R.; Telzer, Eva H.

doi:10.1093/scan/nsy064

Cited by 34 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 53 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In fact, a recent study demonstrated the social brain network to be functionally distinct and robustly recruited in 3-year-old children, independent from explicit mentalizing skills [61]. Similarly, a recent study in 50 children and adolescents did not find an effect of age on several measures of functional connectivity of the social brain [62]. Overall, these and our findings suggest that across study populations, the core neurofunctional network for mentalizing is largely set by the age of 6 and does not undergo gross changes from mid-childhood to adulthood.…”

Section: Effects Of Agementioning

confidence: 95%

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the "social brain," a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the todate largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD. Methods: As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits. Results: We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders.

show abstract

Section: Effects Of Agementioning

confidence: 95%

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Marked improvement in social cognitive skills during childhood and adolescence is generally considered to be the dominant developmental focus of this highly dynamic age range (Blakemore, 2008). The brain regions implicated in "the social brain" are some of the most densely connected in the cortex (McCormick et al, 2018;Oldham and Fornito, 2019;Saxe et al, 2009), and previous studies have shown that significant changes in FC organization of these regions occurs during development (Richardson et al, 2018). Recently, Lake et al used Connectome Predictive Modeling to identify a complex set of FC edges that predict SRS scores in a large sample of children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (Lake et al, 2019).…”

Section: Social Scores and Functional Connectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stability and similarity of the pediatric connectome as developmental measures

Vanderwal

Eilbott²,

Kelly

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Patterns of functional connectivity are unique at the individual level, enabling test-retest matching algorithms to identify a subject from among a group using only their functional connectome. Recent findings show that accuracies of these algorithms in children increase with age. Relatedly, the persistence of functional connectivity (FC) patterns across tasks and rest also increases with age. This study investigated the hypothesis that within-subject stability and between-subject similarity of the whole-brain pediatric connectome are developmentally relevant outcomes. Using data from 210 help-seeking children and adolescents, ages 6-21 years (Healthy Brain Network Biobank), we computed whole-brain FC matrices for each participant during two different movies (MovieDM and MovieTP) and two runs of taskfree rest (all from a single scan session) and fed these matrices to a test-retest matching algorithm. We replicated the finding that matching accuracies for children are low (18-44%) relative to previous work in adults and found that cross-state and cross-movie accuracies for children were the lowest. Next, we calculated three measures of connectome stability for each subject: cross-rest (Rest1-Rest2), cross-state (Rest1-MovieDM), and cross-movie (MovieDM-MovieTP), and three measures of within-state betweensubject connectome similarity for Rest1, MovieDM, and MovieTP. We show that all six measures of stability and similarity are correlated, but that these measures are not related to age. A principal component analysis of these measures yielded two components that were used to test for brain-behavior correlations with IQ, general psychopathology, and a social skills measure (n=119). The first component was significantly correlated with the social skills measure (r=-0.27, p=0.003) and overall psychiatric scores (r=-0.239, p=0.009). Post hoc correlations showed that cross-rest stability was correlated with both social skills (p=0.0007) and general psychopathology (p=0.001). Connectome similarity during MovieDM was also correlated with social skills (p=0.0026). These findings suggest that the stability and similarity of the whole-brain connectome relate to overall brain development, and in particular, to those regions that support social cognition. We infer that the development of the functional connectome simultaneously achieves patterns of FC that are distinct at the individual subject level, that are shared across individuals, and that are persistent across states and across runs-features which presumably combine to optimize neural processing during development. Future longitudinal work could reveal the developmental trajectories of stability and similarity of the connectome.

show abstract

“…Independent Component Analyses confirmed that the pSTS activation in this study was a part of a larger network (IC 26), the social brain network, which was composed of social brain nodes such as the pSTS, bilateral DLPFC, and right temporoparietal junction. DLPFC can be explained as coactivated region of social brain network due to correlation between social brain network and fronto-striatal connectivity (McCormick et al, 2018). Besides the pSTS, the AIC also is known to take part in social processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The underlying neurodevelopmental vulnerability of adolescent brain, such as functional gaps between networks and insufficient segregation of networks (Stevens, 2016), might also play an important role in the neurobiological changes induced by excessive social stimuli. Considering that the social brain network is early-developed compared to other functional networks (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007;McCormick et al, 2018), we suppose that the functional gap between the social network and cognitive network is related to sensitive social perception to excessive social stimuli resulting in increased functional connectivity between salience network and social brain network in IGD. Aberrant functional connectivity of social brain network to other intrinsic networks might also be associated with insufficient segregation during brain maturation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Aberrant posterior superior temporal sulcus functional connectivity and executive dysfunction in adolescents with internet gaming disorder

Lee

Namkoong

et al. 2020

JBA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background and aims The clinical significance of Internet gaming disorder (IGD) is spreading worldwide, but its underlying neural mechanism still remains unclear. Moreover, the prevalence of IGD seems to be the highest in adolescents whose brains are in development. This study investigated the functional connectivity between large-scale intrinsic networks including default mode network, executive control network, and salience network. We hypothesized that adolescents with IGD would demonstrate different functional connectivity patterns among large-scale intrinsic networks, implying neurodevelopmental alterations, which might be associated with executive dysfunction. Methods This study included 17 male adolescents with Internet gaming disorder, and 18 age-matched male adolescents as healthy controls. Functional connectivity was examined using seed-to-voxel analysis and seed-to-seed analysis, with the nodes of large-scale intrinsic networks used as region of interests. Group independent component analysis was performed to investigate spatially independent network. Results We identified aberrant functional connectivity of salience network and default mode network with the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in adolescents with IGD. Furthermore, functional connectivity between salience network and pSTS correlated with proneness to Internet addiction and self-reported cognitive problems. Independent component analysis revealed that pSTS was involved in social brain network. Discussion and conclusions The results imply that aberrant functional connectivity of social brain network with default mode network and salience network was identified in IGD that may be associated with executive dysfunction. Our results suggest that inordinate social stimuli during excessive online gaming leads to altered connections among large-scale networks during neurodevelopment of adolescents.

show abstract

Functional connectivity in the social brain across childhood and adolescence

Cited by 34 publications

References 53 publications

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

Stability and similarity of the pediatric connectome as developmental measures

Aberrant posterior superior temporal sulcus functional connectivity and executive dysfunction in adolescents with internet gaming disorder

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About