Perceived live interaction modulates the developing social brain

Abstract

Although children's social development is embedded in social interaction, most developmental neuroscience studies have examined responses to non-interactive social stimuli (e.g. photographs of faces). The neural mechanisms of real-world social behavior are of special interest during middle childhood (roughly ages 7-13), a time of increased social complexity and competence coinciding with structural and functional social brain development. Evidence from adult neuroscience studies suggests that social interaction may alter neural processing, but no neuroimaging studies in children have directly examined the effects of live social-interactive context on social cognition. In the current study of middle childhood, we compare the processing of two types of speech: speech that children believed was presented over a real-time audio-feed by a social partner and speech that they believed was recorded. Although in reality all speech was prerecorded, perceived live speech resulted in significantly greater neural activation in regions associated with social cognitive processing. These findings underscore the importance of using ecologically-valid and interactive methods to understand the developing social brain.

Social interaction recruits mentalizing and reward systems in middle childhood

“…Nevertheless, our analysis of mentalizing ROIs showed a consistent pattern, with differences in activation to Peer versus Character conditions decreasing with age in all ROIs. Though correlations between age and activation to Peer and Character conditions, respectively, did not reach significance, the decreasing difference may have been driven by increasing mentalizing in response to Character but not Peer conditions, which would accord with previous findings of increasing activation of dMPFC to non-interactive social stimuli across middle childhood (Rice et al, 2016) and in adolescence relative to adulthood (reviewed in Blakemore, 2008). It is also possible that our task is more similar to the real-life peer interactions of younger than older children.…”

“…Still, as in the adult literature, neuroimaging studies on the effect of social interaction on social cognition in middle childhood are scarce. In one such study, similar to the aforementioned study in adults (Rice & Redcay, 2016), perceived live versus recorded speech engaged the TPJ and precuneus in children aged 7–13 (Rice et al, 2016). In a separate experiment in a similar age group, receiving feedback from a peer after sharing information about oneself activated social-cognitive and reward regions, and the magnitude of the social-interactive effect in social-cognitive regions increased with age (Warnell et al, 2018).…”

“…We hypothesized that regions of the traditional mentalizing network would be activated by the Mental versus Non-Mental contrast regardless of social-interactive context. We further hypothesized that mentalizing regions would be activated more in Peer than in Character conditions, suggestive of spontaneous mentalizing during social interaction regardless of explicit task demands, as in our previous studies (Rice et al, 2016; Rice & Redcay, 2016). Further, through conjunction analysis, we determined the extent to which engagement in social interaction recruits the same neural resources as mentalizing did in the offline task.…”

Let's chat: developmental neural bases of social motivation during real‐time peer interaction

“…Indeed, previous studies with children have indicated that similar regions are active simply when listening to speech from a perceived social partner, even without any explicit demands (Rice, Moraczewski, & Redcay, 2016). Interestingly, TPJ and STS did not show the same interaction between contingency and social context present in reward circuitry; these regions were still engaged even when the child viewed messages indicating that the peer was unavailable.…”

“…One possible explanation is that the social cognitive network is involved when processing any socially relevant information, perhaps due to cognitive elaboration about what the social partner thought of the child's answer or due to anticipated future interaction. Indeed, previous studies with children have indicated that similar regions are active simply when listening to speech from a perceived social partner, even without any explicit demands (Rice, Moraczewski, & Redcay, 2016).…”