Abstract
Author SummaryIn the real world, children learn new information by participating in classrooms, interacting with their family and friends, and watching educational videos. While previous neuroimaging research has typically used simple tasks and short-lasting stimuli, in this study we examined brain development using a more complex and naturalistic educational stimulus. Children and adults all watched the same Sesame Street video as we measured their neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examined the timecourses of neural activity over the length of the video for children and adults. We found that the degree to which children showed adult-like brain responses was correlated with their math and verbal knowledge levels. In the intraparietal sulcus, children's neural correlation with adults depended on their mathematics knowledge whereas in Broca's area, it depended on their verbal knowledge. Additional experiments showed that children's neural responses in the intraparietal sulcus are selectively driven by numerical content both when children are watching Sesame Street and when they engage in a number matching task. These convergent results highlight the broad role of the intraparietal sulcus in processing numerical information. In addition, our study validates the use of naturalistic stimuli and child-to-adult neural timecourse correlations for studying brain development. We suggest that this new approach can enrich our understanding of how children's brains process information in the real world.
Highlights
Naturalistic thought is an important phenomenon to understand in children who spend most of their time absorbing new information from complex scenes such as homes, schools, computers, and televisions
While previous neuroimaging research has typically used simple tasks and short-lasting stimuli, in this study we examined brain development using a more complex and naturalistic educational stimulus
We examined the timecourses of neural activity over the length of the video for children and adults
Summary
Naturalistic thought is an important phenomenon to understand in children who spend most of their time absorbing new information from complex scenes such as homes, schools, computers, and televisions. Naturalistic neuroimaging studies open up opportunities to collect neural measurements of children’s unconstrained thoughts during real-world stimulus viewing. Traditional fMRI studies of category and concept development often test neural processes under conditions of maximal stimulus control (e.g., isolated pictures, tones, words, letters, or digits) with short-duration stimuli and short response times (i.e., 2 s). These types of studies are critical for understanding brain development, and considerable progress has been made toward understanding all aspects of brain development using a diverse array of controlled tasks in children; see [5,6,7] for review. The more traditional neuroimaging approach of using highly controlled, simple stimuli and tasks could be complemented by an approach that tests children’s neural responses under more complex real-world conditions
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