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Brain Regions for Perceiving and Reasoning About Other People in School‐Aged Children
concerning this article should be addressed to Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT 46‐4019, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139. Electronic mail may be sent to saxe@mit.edu.
The authors would like to thank Heather Lucas, Jaime Doyle, and Elizabeth Carter for help collecting these data, Shu‐Ju Yang for help designing the stimuli, and Laura Schulz and three anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. We thank Elizabeth Spelke for suggesting the psychological/pragmatic interpretation of the effect of age. We thank the children and their families who made this research possible. This study was funded by a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (K01 MH071284) and John Merck Scholars Awards to R.S. and K.A.P.
Abstract
Neuroimaging studies with adults have identified cortical regions recruited when people think about other people’s thoughts (theory of mind): temporo‐parietal junction, posterior cingulate, and medial prefrontal cortex. These same regions were recruited in 13 children aged 6–11 years when they listened to sections of a story describing a character’s thoughts compared to sections of the same story that described the physical context. A distinct region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus was implicated in the perception of biological motion. Change in response selectivity with age was observed in just one region. The right temporo–parietal junction was recruited equally for mental and physical facts about people in younger children, but only for mental facts in older children.
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