Abstract
Reasoning during social interactions requires the individual manipulation of mental representations of one’s own traits and those of other people as well as their joint consideration (relational integration). Research using nonsocial paradigms has linked relational integration to activity in the rostrolateral PFC. Here, we investigated whether social reasoning is supported by the same general system or whether it additionally relies on regions of the social brain network, such as the medial PFC. We further assessed the development of social reasoning. In the social task, participants evaluated themselves or a friend, or compared themselves with their friend, on a series of traits. In the nonsocial task, participants evaluated their hometown or another town or compared the two. In a behavioral study involving 325 participants (11–39 years old), we found that integrating relations, compared with performing single relational judgments, improves during adolescence, both for social and nonsocial information. Thirty-nine female participants (10–31 years old) took part in a neuroimaging study using a similar task. Activation of the relational integration network, including the rostrolateral PFC, was observed in the comparison condition of both the social and nonsocial tasks, whereas the medial PFC showed greater activation when participants processed social as opposed to nonsocial information across conditions. Developmentally, the right anterior insula showed greater activity in adolescents compared with adults during the comparison of nonsocial versus social information. This study shows parallel recruitment of the social brain and the relational reasoning network during the relational integration of social information in adolescence and adulthood.
Highlights
Is London more expensive than Cambridge? Answering this question entails at least two levels of relational reasoning
In a large behavioral study, we investigated the development of relational integration of social and nonsocial information from late childhood until adulthood
Our aim was to assess (1) how performance on a task requiring relational integration of social or nonsocial traits develops between late childhood and adulthood, (2) how neural activity underlying these processes develops between early adolescence and adulthood, and (3) whether there is domain-specific activation for the relational integration of social versus nonsocial information
Summary
Answering this question entails at least two levels of relational reasoning. One needs to judge the prices in each city independently (evaluation of single relations, e.g., how much do houses in London cost?). One needs to simultaneously consider mental representations of both cities and to integrate the single judgments into a higher-order comparison (relational integration, in this case, comparing the house prices in London and Cambridge). Relational integration has typically been studied in nonsocial contexts, in particular, using the Raven’s Progressive. Relational integration occurs in the social domain, for example, when comparing people on personality traits (e.g., are you more patient than your friend?). The neural processes supporting this kind of social reasoning and the way it develops are not well understood
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