Amygdala volume linked to individual differences in mental state inference in early childhood and adulthood
| Autor: | Brieana Viscomi, Katherine Rice, Tracy Riggins, Elizabeth Redcay |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Adolescent Cognitive Neuroscience Culture Individuality Inference Eye Amygdala Developmental psychology Young Adult Cognition Social cognition Theory of mind medicine Humans Early childhood Child Social Behavior Original Research lcsh:QP351-495 Organ Size Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facial Expression Affect lcsh:Neurophysiology and neuropsychology medicine.anatomical_structure nervous system Mentalization Child Preschool Mental state Individual differences Female Psychology psychological phenomena and processes |
| Zdroj: | Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol 8, Iss C, Pp 153-163 (2014) Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience |
| ISSN: | 1878-9293 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.dcn.2013.09.003 |
| Popis: | Highlights • Children and adults interpreted cognitive and affective states from pictures of eyes. • For children, a larger amygdala was correlated with better cognitive mental state inference. • For adults, a larger amygdala was correlated with better affective mental state inference. • Amygdala size was not related to performance on story-based mental inference tasks. • The amygdala's role in social cognition is task-specific and may change with age. We investigated the role of the amygdala in mental state inference in a sample of adults and in a sample of children aged 4 and 6 years. This period in early childhood represents a time when mentalizing abilities undergo dramatic changes. Both children and adults inferred mental states from pictures of others’ eyes, and children also inferred the mental states of others from stories (e.g., a false belief task). We also collected structural MRI data from these participants, to determine whether larger amygdala volumes (controlling for age and total gray matter volume) were related to better face-based and story-based mentalizing. For children, larger amygdala volumes were related to better face-based, but not story-based, mentalizing. In contrast, in adults, amygdala volume was not related to face-based mentalizing. We next divided the face-based items into two subscales: cognitive (e.g., thinking, not believing) versus affective (e.g., friendly, kind) items. For children, performance on cognitive items was positively correlated with amygdala volume, but for adults, only performance on affective items was positively correlated with amygdala volume. These results indicate that the amygdala's role in mentalizing may be specific to face-based tasks and that the nature of its involvement may change over development. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|