From a young age, children have advanced social perceptual and reasoning abilities. However, the neural development of these abilities is still poorly understood. To address this gap, we used fMRI data collected 122 3-12-year-old children (64 females) and 33 adults (20 females) watched an engaging and socially rich movie to investigate how the cortical basis of social processing changes throughout development. We labeled the movie with visual and social features, including motion energy, presence of a face, presence of a social interaction, theory of mind (ToM) events, valence and arousal. Using a voxel-wise encoding model trained on these features, we find that models based on visual (motion energy) and social (faces, social interaction, ToM, valence, and arousal) features can both predict brain activity in children as young as three years old across the cortex, with particularly high predictivity in motion selective middle temporal region (MT) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Furthermore, models based on individual social features showed that while there may be some development throughout childhood, social interaction information in the STS is present in children as young as three years old and appears adult-like by age seven. The current study, for the first time, links neural activity in children to pre-defined social features in a narrative movie and suggests social interaction perception is supported by early developing neural responses in the STS.Significance Statement This study investigates the neural basis for social scene perception ability in children using fMRI data collected while participants watch a short, animated movie. Unlike most prior studies with movies, we labeled a range of visual and social features in the movie and used machine learning analyses to link each feature to fMRI responses in adults and children ages 3-12. Notably, our results demonstrate strong evidence that children as young as three years old show significant responses to most visual and social features in the movie, including social interaction responses in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region in the brain that is well known to be important in social interaction processing in adults.

中文翻译：

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社交互动感知的早期神经发育：来自幼儿和成人体素编码的证据。


从小，儿童就具有先进的社交感知和推理能力。然而，人们对这些能力的神经发育仍然知之甚少。为了解决这一差距，我们使用了收集的 122 名 3-12 岁儿童（64 名女性）和 33 名成人（20 名女性）观看了一部引人入胜且社交丰富的电影的 fMRI 数据，以调查社会处理的皮层基础在整个发育过程中如何变化。我们用视觉和社会特征标记了这部电影，包括运动能量、面部的存在、社交互动的存在、心智理论 （ToM） 事件、效价和唤醒。使用根据这些特征训练的体素编码模型，我们发现基于视觉（运动能量）和社会（面部、社交互动、ToM、效价和唤醒）特征的模型都可以预测年仅 3 岁儿童的大脑活动在整个皮层中的活动，在运动选择性中颞区 （MT） 和颞上沟 （STS） 的预测性特别高。此外，基于个体社交特征的模型表明，虽然整个童年时期可能会有一些发展，但 STS 中的社交互动信息存在于 3 岁的儿童中，到 7 岁时看起来就像成人一样。目前的研究首次将儿童的神经活动与叙事电影中预定义的社交特征联系起来，并表明 STS 中早期发育的神经反应支持社交互动感知。意义声明 本研究使用参与者观看动画短片时收集的 fMRI 数据调查了儿童社交场景感知能力的神经基础。 与之前大多数电影研究不同，我们在电影中标记了一系列视觉和社会特征，并使用机器学习分析将每个特征与 3-12 岁成人和 fMRI 反应联系起来。值得注意的是，我们的结果证明了强有力的证据表明，年仅 3 岁的儿童对电影中的大多数视觉和社交特征都表现出显着反应，包括颞上沟 （STS） 中的社交互动反应，STS 是大脑中众所周知在成人社交互动处理中很重要的区域。