Functional recruitment and connectivity of the cerebellum supports the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood
Manoli, A.; Van Overwalle, F.; Grosse Wiesmann, C.; Valk, S. L.
Show abstract
There is accumulating evidence that the human cerebellum is heavily implicated in adult social cognition. Yet, its involvement in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM), a hallmark of social cognition, remains elusive. In a functional MRI study involving children with emerging ToM abilities (N=41, age range: 3-12 years) and adults (N=78), we showed that children with ToM abilities activated cerebellar Crus I-II in response to ToM events during a movie-watching task, similar to adults. This activation was absent in children lacking ToM abilities. Functional connectivity profiles between cerebellar and cerebral ToM regions differed as a function of childrens ToM abilities. Notably, task-driven connectivity shifted from upstream to downstream connections between cerebellar and cerebral ToM regions from childhood to adulthood. Greater dependence on connections emerging from the cerebellum early in life suggests an important role of the cerebellum in establishing the cognitive processes underlying ToM in childhood and thus for the undisrupted development of social cognition.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Reconfigurations of cortical manifold structure during reward-based motor learning 96%
- Selective recruitment: Evidence for task-dependent gating of inputs to the cerebellum 95%
- No effect of additional education on long-term brain structure: a preregistered natural experiment in thousands of individuals. 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Functional brain network community structure in childhood: Unfinished territories and fuzzy boundaries 95%
- The midpoint of cortical thinning between late childhood and early adulthood differs between individuals and brain regions: Evidence from longitudinal modelling in a 12-wave neuroimaging sample 94%
- Heritability of hippocampal functional and microstructural organisation 94%
Similar papers in this journal
- Experience sampling reveals the role that covert goal states play in task-relevant behavior. 96%
- Functional Parcellation of the Default Mode Network: A Large-Scale Meta-Analysis 95%
- Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain 94%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.