Preferential responses to faces in superior temporal and medial prefrontal cortex in three-year-old children

Abstract

Perceiving faces and understanding emotions are key components of human social cognition. Prior research with adults and infants suggests that these social cognitive functions are supported by superior temporal cortex (STC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to characterize functional responses in these cortical regions to faces in early childhood. Three-year-old children (n = 88, M(SD) = 3.15(.16) years) passively viewed faces that varied in emotional content and valence (happy, angry, fearful, neutral) and, for fearful and angry faces, intensity (100%, 40%), while undergoing fNIRS. Bilateral STC and MPFC showed greater oxygenated hemoglobin concentration values to all faces relative to objects. MPFC additionally responded preferentially to happy faces relative to neutral faces. We did not detect preferential responses to angry or fearful faces, or overall differences in response magnitude by emotional valence (100% happy vs. fearful and angry) or intensity (100% vs. 40% fearful and angry). In exploratory analyses, preferential responses to faces in MPFC were not robustly correlated with performance on tasks of early social cognition. These results link and extend adult and infant research on functional responses to faces in STC and MPFC and contribute to the characterization of the neural correlates of early social cognition.

Using child‐friendly movie stimuli to study the development of face, place, and object regions from age 3 to 12 years

“…Our success in defining face‐, scene‐, and object‐selective ssROIs complements prior studies showing that this same movie could successfully define ssROIs for regions of the theory of mind network and pain matrix in adults (Jacoby et al, 2016) and evoke distinct responses in these networks in children (Richardson, 2019; Richardson et al, 2018). Our findings also dovetail more generally with other work harnessing movie data to study predictive processing (Lee, Aly, & Baldassano, 2021; Richardson et al, 2021), event structure processing (Baldassano et al, 2017), and individual differences (Finn & Bandettini, 2021; Richardson, 2019; Vanderwal et al, 2017). Taken together, these studies highlight the power of even a very short movie to efficiently evoke a broad set of functional profiles, well beyond that possible with a traditional, highly constrained experiment.…”

“…In addition to early emerging function, our study also found evidence of protracted developmental change, particularly in the faceselective pSTS, where developmental change could not be explained by a confound of increasing attention with age. This finding is consistent with work using traditional paradigms, which has found that responses to faces and socially relevant stimuli are present in pSTS by infancy and early childhood (Otsuka et al, 2007;Lloyd-Fox et al, 2009;Powell et al, 2017;Richardson et al, 2021), but undergo protracted development late into childhood (Ross, de Gelder, Crabbe, & Grosbras, 2014;Scherf et al, 2007;Walbrin, Mihai, Landsiedel, & Koldewyn, 2020) but see (Golarai et al, 2007). This work also fits with a broader literature suggesting that higher-level social regions in general, beyond the pSTS (e.g., the theory of mind network) undergo protracted development across childhood (Gweon et al, 2012;Moraczewski et al, 2018;Richardson et al, 2018;Richardson & Saxe, 2020;Saxe et al, 2009).…”

Embracing neurodiversity in doll play: Investigating neural and language correlates of doll play in a neurodiverse sample

“…For example, fNIRS research showed that social and speech stimuli activated optodes over the pSTS in young infants (Lloyd-Fox et al, 2009. Activity in similar regions was found during naturalistic social interactions with toddlers (Hakuno et al, 2018) and when 3-year-olds viewed faces (Richardson et al, 2021). The evidence that the pSTS is activated during social interactions and social processing is corroborated by fMRI studies with adults (e.g., Deen et al, 2015;Isik et al, 2017).…”