Wiesmann, CG;
Friederici, AD;
Singer, T;
Steinbeis, N;
(2020)
Two systems for thinking about others' thoughts in the developing brain.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)
, 117
(12)
pp. 6928-6935.
10.1073/pnas.1916725117.
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Abstract
Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the laterdeveloping verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others’ minds—mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Two systems for thinking about others' thoughts in the developing brain |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1916725117 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916725117 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Multidisciplinary Sciences, Science & Technology - Other Topics, Theory of Mind, false belief, cortical thickness, gray matter, brain development, FALSE-BELIEF, MIND, INFANTS, METAANALYSIS, THICKNESS, IMPLICIT, CORTEX, MODEL, DONT |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10114739 |
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