B - 12 fMRI Investigation of Socio-Moral Agency in Children and Adolescents.

Abstract

This study investigated the neural substrate of agency in social judgments of children and adolescents. The main hypothesis was that a network of proposed "social brain" structures (the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), medial precuneus (mPc), temporal pole (TP), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) would be recruited when comparing self vs. other agents in socio-moral situations. We suspected that such judgments would incur self/other referential and social cognitive processing and lead to overlapping but also distinctive neural activations in the social brain network. The developmental sample was 9-17-year-old participants (11 male, 8 female) with no medical, neurological or psychiatric history, learning disability, or medication usage. Neuropsychological functions, academic achievement, and social-emotional development were normal. Participants read brief scripts in a high field magnet and provided judgments of whether the social actions were right or wrong. Scripts were balanced for right vs. wrong behaviors, comparing the participant's own actions vs the actions of others as well as a non-social baseline condition. Data were analyzed in Matlab. Results revealed recruitment of mPFC, mPc, TP, and TPJ throughout development, linking agency to other mentalizing processes. There was overlapping recruitment of mPFC, mPc and left TPJ across the 2 conditions. Right TPJ activated only during the self-agency condition; left TP activated only during the other-agency condition. Findings support a specific network of mPFC, mPc, TP and TPJ regions associated with mediation of social agency, similar to adults, which is likely an important neural substrate for maturation of self-regulation and social cognition.