How Thoughts Manifest in Young Children
Written by Hsuan Chen
Edited by Michelle Wong
May 2, 2021
Edited by Michelle Wong
May 2, 2021
What is the stuff of thought? Where does thought originate? How does thinking occur during early childhood and through what mechanisms? How do children interpret others’ thoughts and emotions? To answer these questions, ancient Egyptians would say the heart is the key to mental processes, which is why it is the only organ embalmed in mummification. Conversely Hippocrates would say the brain is the seat of the mind; it is what makes us humans, highly social animals. Today, technology advancement in the twenty-first century gives us leeway into better visualization of children’s brains as they generate thoughts, which helps us acknowledge that children as young as 3 years of age follow specific thought processes.
Previous behavioral studies used the famous false-belief task to show that the brain network – used to make inferences about others’ minds – called the Theory of Mind (ToM) only fully matures at age 5, where children displayed awareness of others possibly holding false or misinformed beliefs. Dr. Richardson and colleagues at MIT were specifically interested in understanding the development of ToM and pain networks of children from ages 3-5. Their study was one of the first to explain how multiple brain networks improve cognitive ability in younger children. In this study, the scientists used the fMRI to visualize children’s brain activities as they watched a short movie, "Partly Cloudy," where two characters, Peck and Gus, undergo dramatic changes in bodily and mental states. In addition, they examined adults’ brain activity under the same setting for comparison.
Initially, the researchers found that both ToM and pain networks in children respond to specific triggering events in the movie regardless of age difference, which supported the hypothesis that functional maturity occurs spontaneously as specific regions increase in selectivity and accuracy rather than with aging. Furthermore, regardless of the performance on the false-belief task, children’s neuronal responses in ToM brain regions to social events in the movie were consistent, reflecting cognitive ability is indicative of the network’s development. In fact, the same regions were also used in adults to process others’ mental states. Finally, children’s ToM display a continuous and gradual improvement from early childhood to adolescence, which enables them to decipher relevant emotions or beliefs that others may possess. Overall, the research group discovered that neural connectivity in ToM and pain regions are functionally distinct and develop gradually throughout life, and their maturity does not depend on the success in false-belief tasks.
While further investigation can be done to distinguish innate and directional-driven components to the observed cognitive changes in response to events in the movie, the developmental pattern of ToM and pain networks discovered here adds new insights to identifying neural circuit impairments that play a role in neurodevelopmental disorders — like speech impediment — in children. This integration of social cognition and cognitive psychology provides targets for novel therapeutic approaches, which can later help people make informative decisions when seeking appropriate treatments.
Image Source: “The default mode network (DMN) includes regions in the medial pre-frontal cortex, precuneus, and bilateral parietal cortex” by John Graner, Terrence R. Oakes, Louis M. French and Gerard Riedy licensed under CC BY 3.0