Watching cartoons activates the medial prefrontal cortex in children

Developmental changes in story-evoked responses in the neocortex and hippocampus

How does the representation of naturalistic life events change with age? Here, we analyzed fMRI data from 414 children and adolescents (5-19 years) as they watched a narrative movie. In addition to changes in the degree of inter-subject correlation (ISC) with age in sensory and medial parietal regions, we used a novel measure (between-group ISC) to reveal age-related shifts in the responses across the majority of the neocortex. Over the course of development, brain responses became more discretized into stable and coherent events and shifted earlier in time to anticipate upcoming perceived event transitions, measured behaviorally in an age-matched sample. However, hippocampal responses to event boundaries actually decreased with age, suggesting a shifting division of labor between episodic encoding processes and schematic event representations between the ages of 5 and 19.

Principal component analysis reveals multiple consistent responses to naturalistic stimuli in children and adults

Functional MRI (fMRI) study of naturalistic conditions, for example, movie watching, usually focuses on shared responses across subjects. However, individual differences have been attracting increasing attention in search of group differences or associations with behavioral outcomes. Individual differences are typically studied by directly modeling the pair‐wise intersubject correlation matrix or projecting the relations onto a single dimension. We contend that it is critical to examine whether there are one or more consistent responses underlying the whole sample, because multiple components, if exist, may undermine the intersubject relations using the previous methods. We propose to use principal component analysis (PCA) to examine the heterogeneity of brain responses across subjects and project the individual variability into higher dimensions. By analyzing an fMRI dataset of children and adults watching a cartoon movie, we showed evidence of two consistent responses in the supramarginal gyrus and other regions. While the first components in many regions represented a response pattern mostly in older children and adults, the second components mainly represented the younger children. The second components in the supramarginal network resembled a delayed version of the first PCs for 4 s (2 TR), indicating slower responses in the younger children than the older children and adults. The analyses highlight the importance of identifying multiple consistent responses in responses to naturalistic stimuli. This PCA‐based approach could be complementary to the commonly used intersubject correlation to analyze movie‐watching data.

Reality Status Judgments of Real and Fantastical Events in Children's Prefrontal Cortex: An fNIRS Study

The present study aimed to examine neural mechanisms underlying the ability to differentiate reality from fantasy. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we measured prefrontal activations in children and adults while they performed a reality judgment task. Participants’ task was to judge the reality status of events in fantastical and realistic videos. Behavioral data revealed that, although there was no accuracy difference, children showed significantly longer reaction times in making the judgments than did adults. The fNIRS data consistently revealed higher prefrontal activations in children than in adults when watching the videos and judging the reality of the events. These results suggest that when making judgments of event reality, children may require more cognitive resources and also mainly rely on their own personal experiences.

Movies in the magnet: Naturalistic paradigms in developmental functional neuroimaging

The use of movie-watching as an acquisition state for functional connectivity (FC) MRI has recently enabled multiple groups to obtain rich data sets in younger children with both substantial sample sizes and scan durations. Using naturalistic paradigms such as movies has also provided analytic flexibility for these developmental studies that extends beyond conventional resting state approaches. This review highlights the advantages and challenges of using movies for developmental neuroimaging and explores some of the methodological issues involved in designing pediatric studies with movies. Emerging themes from movie-watching studies are discussed, including an emphasis on intersubject correlations, developmental changes in network interactions under complex naturalistic conditions, and dynamic age-related changes in both sensory and higher-order network FC even in narrow age ranges. Converging evidence suggests an enhanced ability to identify brain-behavior correlations in children when using movie-watching data relative to both resting state and conventional tasks. Future directions and cautionary notes highlight the potential and the limitations of using movies to study FC in pediatric populations.

Neural responses to cartoon facial attractiveness: An event-related potential study

Animation creates a vivid, virtual world and expands the scope of human imagination. In this study, we investigated the time-courses of brain responses related to the evaluation of the attractiveness of cartoon faces using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. The results demonstrated that N170 amplitude was higher for attractive than for unattractive cartoon faces in males, while the opposite was found in females. Facial attractiveness notably modulated the late positive component (LPC), which might reflect the task-related process of aesthetic appraisal of beauty. The mean LPC amplitude in males was significantly higher for attractive cartoon faces than for unattractive faces, while the LPC amplitude in females did not significantly differ between attractive and unattractive cartoon faces. Moreover, the paint mode (computer graphics, gouache, and stick figure) modulated the early encoding of facial structures and the late evaluative process. The early modulation effect by paint mode may be related to the spatial frequency of the pictures. The processing speed and intensity in females were both higher than those in males. In conclusion, our study, for the first time, reported ERP modulation based on the assessment of cartoon facial attractiveness, suggesting the facilitated selection of attractiveness information at the early stage, and that the attentional enhancement of attractive faces at the late stage only exists in males. This suggests that men's brains are hard-wired to be sensitive to facial beauty, even in cartoons.