Abstract
Adolescence is a time of significant cortical changes in the ‘social brain’, a set of brain regions involved in sophisticated social inference. However, there is limited evidence linking the structural changes in social brain to development of social behavior. The present study investigated how cortical development of the social brain relates to other-regarding behavior, in the context of fairness concerns. Participants aged between 9 to 23 years old responded to multiple rounds of ultimatum game proposals. The degree to which each participant considers fairness of intention (i.e., intention-based reciprocity) vs. outcome (i.e., egalitarianism) was quantified using economic utility models. We observed a gradual shift in other-regarding preferences from simple rule-based egalitarianism to complex intention-based reciprocity from early childhood to young adulthood. The preference shift was associated with cortical thinning of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and posterior temporal cortex. Meta-analytic reverse-inference analysis showed that these regions were involved in social inference. Importantly, the other-regarding preference shift was statistically mediated by cortical thinning in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Together these findings suggest that development of the ability to perform sophisticated other-regarding social inference is associated with the structural changes of specific social brain regions in late adolescence.
Highlights
The foundation of modern society is based on large-scale cooperation between genetically unrelated conspecifics[1,2,3,4]
Consistent with our prediction that older participants would be more likely to consider the intention of proposers, the decision patterns of older participants matched more closely the acceptance rates predicted by the reciprocity model than the inequity aversion model
The results showed that the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) for the inequity aversion model did not change with age (B = 0.633, SE = 1.887, t = 0.335, n.s.), while the BIC for the reciprocity model significantly decreased with age (B = − 7.306, SE = 2.987, t = −2.446, p = 0.016)
Summary
The foundation of modern society is based on large-scale cooperation between genetically unrelated conspecifics[1,2,3,4]. The present study investigates how cortical development from childhood to adulthood relate to the computational demands associated with different types of other-regarding preferences, namely egalitarianism and intention-based reciprocity. The choice sets available to proposers were drawn from three different conditions: fair-alternative (unfair vs fair), hyperfair-alternative (unfair vs hyperfair), and no-alternative (identical unfair) This design has the potential to behaviorally disentangle preferences for egalitarianism and intention-based reciprocity. Based on prior work we hypothesized that younger participants would primarily be concerned with minimizing inequity in payoffs and would reject most of the unfair offers[23, 27] This model of egalitarian other-regarding preference was quantified using the inequity-aversion model[15]. We calculated how well each model explained their data and identified which regions of the brain mediate the preference shifts
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