Lincoln Sarah Hope, Mukerji Cora M, Dodell-Feder David, Riccio Arianna, Hooker Christine I
Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States.
Department of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Dec 10;12:714176. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714176. eCollection 2021.
Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to think about the perspectives, beliefs, and feelings of another, develops throughout childhood and adolescence and is an important skill for social interactions. This study examines neural activity in typically developing children during a novel ToM task - the Movie Mentalizing Task- and tests its relations to ToM behavioral performance and social functioning. In this fMRI task, children ages 8-13years (=25) watched a brief movie clip and were asked to predict a character's mental state after a social interaction. Engaging in the Movie Mentalizing Task activated the ToM neural network. Moreover, greater neural activity in the ToM network, including the superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, was associated with better behavioral performance on independent ToM tasks and was related to better social functioning, though these results do not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Results offer a new affective theory of mind task for children in the scanner that robustly recruits activity in theory of mind regions.
心理理论（ToM），即思考他人观点、信念和感受的能力，在整个童年和青少年时期发展，是社交互动中的一项重要技能。本研究考察了在一项新颖的心理理论任务——电影心理化任务中发育正常儿童的神经活动，并测试其与心理理论行为表现和社会功能的关系。在这项功能磁共振成像任务中，8至13岁（n = 25）的儿童观看一段简短的电影片段，并被要求预测一次社交互动后一个角色的心理状态。参与电影心理化任务激活了心理理论神经网络。此外，心理理论网络中更强的神经活动，包括颞上回和额下回，与在独立心理理论任务上更好的行为表现相关，并且与更好的社会功能有关，尽管这些结果在多重比较校正后并不显著。研究结果为在扫描仪中的儿童提供了一种新的情感心理理论任务，该任务能有力地激发心理理论区域的活动。
