Experimental evidence for a child-to-adolescent switch in human amygdala-prefrontal cortex communication: A cross-sectional pilot study.

Interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are fundamental to human emotion. Despite the central role of frontoamygdala communication in adult emotional learning and regulation, little is known about how top-down control emerges during human development. In the present cross-sectional pilot study, we experimentally manipulated prefrontal engagement to test its effects on the amygdala during development. Inducing dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activation resulted in developmentally-opposite effects on amygdala reactivity during childhood versus adolescence, such that dACC activation was followed by increased amygdala reactivity in childhood but reduced amygdala reactivity in adolescence. Bayesian network analyses revealed an age-related switch between childhood and adolescence in the nature of amygdala connectivity with the dACC and ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). Whereas adolescence was marked by information flow from dACC and vmPFC to amygdala (consistent with that observed in adults), the reverse information flow, from the amygdala to dACC and vmPFC, was dominant in childhood. The age-related switch in information flow suggests a potential shift from bottom-up co-excitatory to top-down regulatory frontoamygdala connectivity and may indicate a profound change in the circuitry supporting maturation of emotional behavior. These findings provide novel insight into the developmental construction of amygdala-cortical connections and implications for the ways in which childhood experiences may influence subsequent prefrontal function.

The Intentional Selection Assumption.

There exists a rich literature describing how social context influences decision making. Here, we propose a novel framing of social influences, the Intentional Selection Assumption. This framework proposes that, when a person is presented with a set of options by another social agent, people may treat the set of options as intentionally selected, reflecting the chooser's inferences about the presenter and the presenter's goals. To describe our proposal, we draw analogies to the cognition literature on sampling inferences within concept learning. This is done to highlight how the Intentional Selection Assumption accounts for both normative (e.g., comparing perceived utilities) and subjective (e.g., consideration of context relevance) principles in decision making, while also highlighting how analogous findings in the concept learning literature can aid in bridging these principles by drawing attention to the importance of potential sampling assumptions within decision making paradigms. We present the two behavioral experiments that provide support to this proposal and find that social-contextual cues influence choice behavior with respect to the induction of sampling assumptions. We then discuss a theoretical framework of the Intentional Selection Assumption alongside the possibility of its potential relationships to contemporary models of choice. Overall, our results emphasize the flexibility of decision makers with respect to social-contextual factors without sacrificing systematicity regarding the preference for specific options with a higher value or utility.