Functional organization of the temporal-parietal junction for theory of mind in preverbal infants: A near-infrared spectroscopy study

Abstract

Successful human social life requires imagining what others believe or think to understand and predict behavior. This ability, often referred to as theory of mind, reliably engages a specialized network of temporal and prefrontal brain regions in older children and adults, including selective recruitment of temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). To date, how and when this specialized brain organization for ToM arises is unknown due to limitations in functional neuroimaging at younger ages. Here we employed the emerging technique of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure the functional brain response across the parietal, temporal, and prefrontal regions in 7-month old male and female infants as they viewed different video scenarios of a person searching for a hidden object. Over different conditions, we manipulated whether the person held an accurate (true) or inaccurate (false) belief about the location of the hidden object in the videos. In two separate experiments, we observed that the TPJ, but not other temporal and prefrontal regions, spontaneously tracked with the beliefs of the other person, responding more during scenarios when the other person’s belief regarding the location of the object was false compared to scenarios when her belief was true. These results mirror those obtained with adults to show that the TPJ already shows some functional organization relevant to high-level social cognition by around 7-months. Furthermore, these results suggest that infants may draw on similar core mechanisms to implicitly track beliefs as adults do when explicitly reasoning about them.

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

“…Future research will need to directly contrast brain activation during these tasks with activation during other social-cognitive processes that have been shown to recruit portions of the SMG, such as handling conflict and biases in visual and emotional perspectives (14,36), action observation (39,40), and social as well as nonsocial modulations of attention and encoding (19,34,37,52) in children younger than 4 y of age. This will be a challenge as it requires task-based functional MRI with very young children (14) because the relatively low spatial resolution of infant neuroimaging methods (such as NIRS) does not allow reliably measuring and dissociating the relevant brain regions (i.e., TPJ versus SMG and different portions of the PC) (20). In addition to understanding the neural processes underlying implicit ToM success and their exact function, further behavioral experimental manipulations and correlates would help to clarify what drives children's correct looking behavior in the implicit ToM tasks and how to interpret this behavior.…”

“…However, a recent multistudy analysis comparing whole-brain activation for implicit and explicit ToM tasks found a number of distinct brain regions for implicit ToM and an overlap with explicit ToM only in the right (R) TPJ (19). A recent study using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in infants aged 7 mo gives further indications of activation over temporoparietal regions (20). However, the spatial resolution of fNIRS does not allow for more specific localization, and a direct comparison with explicit ToM tasks, which are designed for considerably older children, is not possible in infants.…”

The Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Knowledge Attribution: An EEG Study - Preprint

“…This approach to knowledge attribution can be found in the tendency of empirical literature to often list knowledge alongside belief and desire as a paradigm mental state (see e.g. McCleery et al 2011;Bradford et al 2015;Ferguson et al 2017;Hyde et al 2018). Additionally, two prominent philosophers have also argued that knowledge is a mental state (Williamson 2000;Nagel 2013).…”

Reduced Neural Selectivity for Mental States in Deaf Children with Delayed Exposure to Sign Language

“…). A recent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study found RTPJ activation to false belief scenarios in 7-month old infants97 . How can RTPJ support performance on such tasks, given our evidence that RTPJ development depends on rich linguistic experience?…”