Children with maltreatment exposure exhibit rumination-like spontaneous thought patterns: association with symptoms of depression, subcallosal cingulate cortex thickness, and cortisol levels.

BACKGROUND: Childhood maltreatment is associated with pervasive risk for depression. However, the immediate cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate this risk during development are unknown. We here studied the impact of maltreatment on self-generated thought (SGT) patterns and their association with depressive symptoms, subcallosal cingulate cortex (SCC) thickness, and cortisol levels in children. METHODS: We recruited 183 children aged 6-12 years, 96 of which were exposed to maltreatment. Children performed a mind wandering task to elicit SGTs. A subgroup of children underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (N = 155) for SCC thickness analyses and saliva collection for quantification of free cortisol concentrations (N = 126) was collected. Using network analysis, we assessed thought networks and compared these networks between children with and without maltreatment exposure. Using multilevel analyses, we then tested the association between thought networks of children with maltreatment exposure with depressive symptoms, SCC thickness, and cortisol levels. RESULTS: Children exposed to maltreatment generated fewer positively valenced thoughts. Network analysis revealed rumination-like thought patterns in children with maltreatment exposure, which were associated with depressive symptoms, SCC thickness, and cortisol levels. Children with maltreatment exposure further exhibited decreased future-self thought coupling, which was associated with depressive symptoms, while other-related and past-oriented thoughts had the greatest importance within the network. CONCLUSIONS: Using a novel network analytic approach, we provide evidence that children exposed to maltreatment exhibit ruminative clustering of thoughts, which is associated with depressive symptoms and neurobiological correlates of depression. Our results provide a specific target for clinical translation to design early interventions for middle childhood. Targeting thought patterns in children with maltreatment exposure may be an effective strategy to effectively mitigate depression risk early in life.

Computational and behavioral markers of model-based decision making in childhood.

Human decision-making is underpinned by distinct systems that differ in flexibility and associated cognitive cost. A widely accepted dichotomy distinguishes between a cheap but rigid model-free system and a flexible but costly model-based system. Typically, humans use a hybrid of both types of decision-making depending on environmental demands. However, children's use of a model-based system during decision-making has not yet been shown. While prior developmental work has identified simple building blocks of model-based reasoning in young children (1-4 years old), there has been little evidence of this complex cognitive system influencing behavior before adolescence. Here, by using a modified task to make engagement in cognitively costly strategies more rewarding, we show that children aged 5-11-years (N = 85), including the youngest children, displayed multiple indicators of model-based decision making, and that the degree of its use increased throughout childhood. Unlike adults (N = 24), however, children did not display adaptive arbitration between model-free and model-based decision-making. Our results demonstrate that throughout childhood, children can engage in highly sophisticated and costly decision-making strategies. However, the flexible arbitration between decision-making strategies might be a critically late-developing component in human development.

Two systems for thinking about others' thoughts in the developing brain.

Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the later-developing verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others' minds-mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.

Exploration heuristics decrease during youth.

Deciding between exploring new avenues and exploiting known choices is central to learning, and this exploration-exploitation trade-off changes during development. Exploration is not a unitary concept, and humans deploy multiple distinct mechanisms, but little is known about their specific emergence during development. Using a previously validated task in adults, changes in exploration mechanisms were investigated between childhood (8-9 y/o, N = 26; 16 females), early (12-13 y/o, N = 38; 21 females), and late adolescence (16-17 y/o, N = 33; 19 females) in ethnically and socially diverse schools from disadvantaged areas. We find an increased usage of a computationally light exploration heuristic in younger groups, effectively accommodating their limited neurocognitive resources. Moreover, this heuristic was associated with self-reported, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms in this population-based sample. This study enriches our mechanistic understanding about how exploration strategies mature during development.

Development of functional network architecture explains changes in children's altruistically motivated helping.

Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. One-hundred and twenty seven 6-12 year-old children performed a novel gustatory costly helping task designed to measure altruistic motivations of helping behaviour. Neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms including emotion regulation, emotional clarity and attentional reorienting were assessed experimentally through an extensive task-battery while functional brain activity and connectivity were measured during an empathy for taste paradigm and during rest. Altruistically motivated helping increased with age. Out of all mechanisms probed for, only emotional clarity increased with age and accounted for altruistically motivated helping. This was associated with greater functional integration of the empathy-related network with fronto-parietal brain regions at rest. We isolate a highly specific neuroaffective mechanism as the crucial driver of altruistically motivated helping during child development.

Changes in BOLD variability are linked to the development of variable response inhibition.

Research on the development of response inhibition in humans has focused almost exclusively on average stopping performance. The development of intra-individual variability in stopping performance and its underlying neural circuitry has remained largely unstudied, even though understanding variability is of core importance for understanding development. In a total sample of 45 participants (19 children aged 10-12 years and 26 adults aged 18-26 years) of either sex we aimed to identify age-related changes in intra-individual response inhibition performance and its underlying brain signal variability. While there was no difference in average stopping performance between children and adults, stop signal latencies for the children were more variable. Further, brain signal variability during successful stopping was significantly higher in adults compared to children, especially in bilateral thalamus, but also across regions of the inhibition network. Finally, brain signal variability was significantly associated with stopping performance behavioral variability in adults. Together these results indicate that variability in stopping performance decreases, whereas neural variability in the inhibition network increases, from childhood to adulthood. Future work will need to assess whether developmental changes in neural variability drive those in behavioral variability. In sum, both, neural and behavioral variability indices might be a more sensitive measure of developmental differences in response inhibition compared to the standard average-based measurements.

Computational modelling of attentional bias towards threat in paediatric anxiety.

Computational modelling can be used to precisely characterize the cognitive processes involved in attentional biases towards threat, yet so far has only been applied in the context of adult anxiety. Furthermore, studies investigating attentional biases in childhood anxiety have largely used tasks that conflate automatic and controlled attentional processes. By using a perceptual load paradigm, we separately investigate contributions from automatic and controlled processes to attentional biases towards negative stimuli and their association with paediatric anxiety. We also use computational modelling to investigate these mechanisms in children for the first time. In a sample of 60 children (aged 5-11 years) we used a perceptual load task specifically adapted for children, in order to investigate attentional biases towards fearful (compared with happy and neutral) faces. Outcome measures were reaction time and percentage accuracy. We applied a drift diffusion model to investigate the precise cognitive mechanisms involved. The load effect was associated with significant differences in response time, accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameters drift rate and extra-decisional time. Greater anxiety was associated with greater accuracy and the diffusion modelling parameter 'drift rate' on the fearful face trials. This was specific to the high load condition. These findings suggest that attentional biases towards fearful faces in childhood anxiety are driven by increased perceptual sensitivity towards fear in automatic attentional systems. Our findings from computational modelling suggest that current attention bias modification treatments should target perceptual encoding directly rather than processes occurring afterwards.

I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice.

Adolescents aspire for independence. Successful independence means knowing when to rely on one's own knowledge and when to listen to others. A critical prerequisite thus is a well-developed metacognitive ability to accurately assess the quality of one's own knowledge. Little is known about whether the strive to become an independent decision maker in adolescence is underpinned by the necessary metacognitive skills. Here, we demonstrate that metacognition matures from childhood to adolescence (N = 107) and that this process coincides with greater independent decision-making. We show that adolescents, in contrast to children, take on others' advice less often, but only when the advice is misleading. Finally, we demonstrate that adolescents' reduced reliance on others' advice is explained by their increased metacognitive skills, suggesting that a developing ability to introspect may support independent decision-making in adolescence.

Getting less than their fair share: Maltreated youth are hyper-cooperative yet vulnerable to exploitation in a public goods game.

Human cooperative behavior has long been thought to decline under adversity. However, studies have primarily examined perceived patterns of cooperation, with little eye to actual cooperative behavior embedded within social interaction. Game-theoretical paradigms can help close this gap by unpacking subtle differences in how cooperation unfolds during initial encounters. This study is the first to use a child-appropriate, virtual, public goods game to study actual cooperative behavior in 329 participants aged 9-16 years with histories of maltreatment (n = 99) and no maltreatment (n = 230) while controlling for psychiatric symptoms. Unlike work on perceived patterns of cooperation, we found that maltreated participants actually contribute more resources to a public good during peer interaction than their nonmaltreated counterparts. This effect was robust when controlling for psychiatric symptoms and peer problems as well as demographic variables. We conclude that maltreatment may engender a hyper-cooperative strategy to minimize the odds of hostility and preserve positive interaction during initial encounters. This, however, comes at the cost of potential exploitation by others.

Taxing behavioral control diminishes sharing and costly punishment in childhood.

Instances of altruism in children are well documented. However, the underlying mechanisms of such altruistic behavior are still under considerable debate. While some claim that altruistic acts occur automatically and spontaneously, others argue that they require behavioral control. This study focuses on the mechanisms that give rise to prosocial decisions such as sharing and costly punishment. In two studies it is shown in 124 children aged 6-9 years that behavioral control plays a critical role for both prosocial decisions and costly punishment. Specifically, the studies assess the influence of taxing aspects of self-regulation, such as behavioral control (Study 1) and emotion regulation (Study 2) on subsequent decisions in a Dictator and an Ultimatum Game. Further, children's perception of fairness norms and emotional experience were measured. Taxing children's behavioral control prior to making their decisions reduced sharing and costly punishment of unfair offers, without changing perception of fairness norms or the emotional experience. Conversely, taxing children's emotion regulation prior to making their decisions only led to increased experience of anger at seeing unfair offers, but left sharing, costly punishment and the perception of fairness norms unchanged. These findings stress the critical role of behavioral control in prosocial giving and costly punishment in childhood.

Longitudinal evidence for 4-year-olds' but not 2- and 3-year-olds' false belief-related action anticipation.

Recently, infants younger than 2 years have been shown to display correct expectations of the actions of an agent with a false belief. The developmental trajectory of these early-developing abilities and their robustness, however, remain a matter of debate. Here, we tested children longitudinally from 2 to 4 years of age with an established anticipatory looking false belief task, and found a significant developmental change between the ages of 3 and 4 years. Children anticipated correctly only by the age of 4 years, and performed at chance at the ages of 2 and 3 years. Moreover, we found correct anticipation only when the agent falsely believed an object to be in its last rather than a previous location. These findings point towards the fragility of early belief-related action anticipation before the age of 4 years, when children start passing traditional false belief tasks.

Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children.

The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger than 2 years of age have been shown to pass novel implicit false belief tasks. However, the processes underlying these tasks and their relation to later-developing explicit false belief understanding, as well as to other cognitive abilities, are not yet understood. Here, we study a battery of implicit and explicit false belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children, relating their performance to linguistic abilities and executive functions. The present data show a significant developmental change from failing explicit false belief tasks at 3 years of age to passing them at the age of 4, while both age groups pass implicit false belief tasks. This differential developmental trajectory is reflected by the finding that explicit and implicit false belief tasks do not correlate. Further, we demonstrate that explicit false belief tasks correlate with syntactic and executive functions, whereas implicit false belief tasks do not. The study thus indicates that the processes underlying implicit false belief tasks are different from later-developing explicit false belief understanding. Moreover, our results speak for a critical role of syntactic and executive functions for passing standard explicit false belief tasks in contrast to implicit tasks.

Development of Behavioral Control and Associated vmPFC-DLPFC Connectivity Explains Children's Increased Resistance to Temptation in Intertemporal Choice.

Human civilization is based on the successful pursuit of long-term goals, requiring the ability to forego immediate pleasure for the sake of larger future rewards. This ability improves with age, but the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying its development remain elusive. The developmental changes could result either from younger children valuing immediate rewards more strongly or because older children become better at controlling their impulses. By implementing 2 tasks, a choice-independent valuation task and an intertemporal choice task, both behaviorally and using fMRI in twenty 6- to 13-year old children, we show developmental improvements in behavioral control to uniquely account for age-related changes in temporal discounting. We show further that overcoming temptation during childhood occurs as a function of an age-related increase in functional coupling between value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and brain regions dedicated to behavioral control, such as left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during choice. These findings can help to devise measures that reduce the substantial costs of impatience to society.

Enhancing behavioral control increases sharing in children.

Young children endorse norms of fairness but rarely act on them. We investigated whether a failure of behavioral control can partially explain why children do not share more generously than they do. We experimentally manipulated behavioral control and observed its effects on sharing in 120 children aged 6-9years of age. Using a between-participants design, we presented children with stories in which a protagonist either exerted behavioral control in an unrelated context or not. Following this, children engaged in a sharing task. We found that children who had been read a story promoting behavioral control shared more than children who had been read a neutral story. This effect held over two different types of instruction. Perceptions of fairness, on the other hand, were identical across conditions. These findings speak to the importance of behavioral control in prosocial behavior, and specifically sharing, during middle childhood.

Children's Increased Emotional Egocentricity Compared to Adults Is Mediated by Age-Related Differences in Conflict Processing.

This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying age-related differences in emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) between children (aged 7-12 years, n = 30) and adults (aged 20-30 years, n = 30) using a novel paradigm of visuogustatory stimulation to induce pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Both children and adults showed an EBB, but that of children was larger. The EEB did not correlate with other measures of egocentricity. Crucially, the developmental differences in EEB were mediated by age-related changes in conflict processing and not visual perspective taking, response inhibition, or processing speed. This indicates that different types of egocentricity develop independently of one another and that the increased ability to overcome EEB can be explained by age-related improvements in conflict processing.

Projecting my envy onto you: neurocognitive mechanisms of an offline emotional egocentricity bias.

Humans often project their own beliefs, desires and emotions onto others, indicating an inherent egocentrism. In five studies we investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) and specifically an offline EEB, defined as the projection of one's own tendency to react with a certain emotional response pattern in a given situation onto other people. We used a competitive reaction time game associated with monetary gains and losses that allowed inducing feelings of envy and Schadenfreude. While we found evidence for the first hand experience of envy and Schadenfreude, we also observed an offline bias, that is participants on average projected feelings of envy and Schadenfreude when having to judge others. Importantly the extent of experienced and projected social emotions were highly correlated. This bias was observed when participants were both directly involved and also as an uninvolved party, suggesting the offline bias to be independent of the presently experienced emotion. Under increased time pressure however an online bias emerged whereby participants just projected their presently experienced emotions onto the other. Finally, we show that on the neural level shared neuronal networks underlie the offline EEB at least for envy. Thus, for envy, activity of the same part of anterior insula was sensitive to individual differences both in the experience and the projection of envy. These findings outline the set of circumstances leading to specific types of empathic attribution biases and show that individual differences in the experience of social emotions are predictive of the offline egocentricity bias both on a behavioral as well as a neural level. These data extend present models on the neurocognitive mechanisms of interpersonal understanding in the socio-affective domain.

Medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortical thickness predicts shared individual differences in self-generated thought and temporal discounting.

When deprived of compelling perceptual input, the mind is often occupied with thoughts unrelated to the immediate environment. Previous behavioral research has shown that this self-generated task-unrelated thought (TUT), especially under non-demanding conditions, relates to cognitive capacities such as creativity, planning, and reduced temporal discounting. Despite the frequency and importance of this type of cognition, little is known about its structural brain basis. Using MRI-based cortical thickness measures in 37 participants, we were able to show that individuals with a higher tendency to engage in TUT under low-demanding conditions (but not under high-demanding conditions) show an increased thickness of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior/midcingulate cortex. Thickness of these regions also related to less temporal discounting (TD) of monetary rewards in an economic task, indicative of more patient decision-making. The findings of a shared structural substrate in mPFC and anterior/midcingulate cortex underlying both TUT and TD suggest an important role of these brain regions in supporting the self-generation of information that is unrelated to the immediate environment and which may be adaptive in nature.

Cognitive control training with domain-general response inhibition does not change children's brains or behavior.

Cognitive control is required to organize thoughts and actions and is critical for the pursuit of long-term goals. Childhood cognitive control relates to other domains of cognitive functioning and predicts later-life success and well-being. In this study, we used a randomized controlled trial to test whether cognitive control can be improved through a pre-registered 8-week intervention in 235 children aged 6-13 years targeting response inhibition and whether this leads to changes in multiple behavioral and neural outcomes compared to a response speed training. We show long-lasting improvements of closely related measures of cognitive control at the 1-year follow-up; however, training had no impact on any behavioral outcomes (decision-making, academic achievement, mental health, fluid reasoning and creativity) or neural outcomes (task-dependent and intrinsic brain function and gray and white matter structure). Bayesian analyses provide strong evidence of absent training effects. We conclude that targeted training of response inhibition does little to change children's brains or their behavior.

Trial protocol for the Building Resilience through Socio-Emotional Training (ReSET) programme: a cluster randomised controlled trial of a new transdiagnostic preventative intervention for adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a period of heightened vulnerability to developing mental health problems, and rates of mental health disorder in this age group have increased in the last decade. Preventing mental health problems developing before they become entrenched, particularly in adolescents who are at high risk, is an important research and clinical target. Here, we report the protocol for the trial of the 'Building Resilience through Socioemotional Training' (ReSET) intervention. ReSET is a new, preventative intervention that incorporates individual-based emotional training techniques and group-based social and communication skills training. We take a transdiagnostic approach, focusing on emotion processing and social mechanisms implicated in the onset and maintenance of various forms of psychopathology. METHODS: A cluster randomised allocation design is adopted with randomisation at the school year level. Five-hundred and forty adolescents (aged 12-14) will be randomised to either receive the intervention or not (passive control). The intervention is comprised of weekly sessions over an 8-week period, supplemented by two individual sessions. The primary outcomes, psychopathology symptoms and mental wellbeing, will be assessed pre- and post-intervention, and at a 1-year follow-up. Secondary outcomes are task-based assessments of emotion processing, social network data based on peer nominations, and subjective ratings of social relationships. These measures will be taken at baseline, post-intervention and 1-year follow-up. A subgroup of participants and stakeholders will be invited to take part in focus groups to assess the acceptability of the intervention. DISCUSSION: This project adopts a theory-based approach to the development of a new intervention designed to target the close connections between young people's emotions and their interpersonal relationships. By embedding the intervention within a school setting and using a cluster-randomised design, we aim to develop and test a feasible, scalable intervention to prevent the onset of psychopathology in adolescence. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN88585916. Trial registration date: 20/04/2023.