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

Why wearing a yellow hat is impossible: Chinese and U.S. children's possibility judgments

When thinking about possibility, one can consider both epistemic and deontic principles (i.e., physical possibility and permissibility). Cultural influences may lead individuals to weigh epistemic and deontic obligations differently; developing possibility conceptions are therefore positioned to be affected by cultural surroundings. Across two studies, 251 U.S. and Chinese 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds sampled from major metropolitan areas in Texas and the Hubei, Sichuan, Gansu, and Guangdong Provinces judged the possibility of impossible, improbable, and ordinary events. Across cultures and ages, children judged ordinary events as possible and impossible events as impossible; cultural differences emerged in developing conceptions of improbable events. Whereas U.S. children became more likely to judge these events possible with age, Chinese children's judgments remained consistent with age: Chinese 4- to 8-year-olds judged these events to be possible ∼25% of the time. In Study 2, to test whether this difference was attributable to differential prioritization of epistemic versus deontic constraints, children also judged whether each event was an epistemic violation (i.e., required magic to happen) and a deontic violation (i.e., would result in someone getting in trouble). With age, epistemic judgments were increasingly predictive of possibility judgments for improbable events for U.S. children, and decreasingly so for Chinese children. Contrary to our predictions, deontic judgments were not predictive. We propose that cultural valuation of norms might shape children's developing intuitions about possibility. We discuss our findings in light of three accounts of possibility conceptions, suggesting ways to integrate cultural context into each.

A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Examination of the Neural Correlates of Mental Rotation for Individuals With Different Depressive Tendencies

The present study aimed to examine the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to process the mental rotation with mirrored stimuli for different depressive tendencies with psychomotor retardation. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we measured brain cortex activation of participants with higher and lower depressive tendencies while performing a left-right paradigm of object mental rotation or a same-different paradigm of subject mental rotation. Behavioral data revealed no differences in reaction time and rotation speed. The fNIRS data revealed a higher deactivation of oxyhemoglobin (HbO) change for the higher depression group in the perceptual stage of object mental rotation with mirrored stimuli in the superior external frontal cortex (BA46), inferior frontal gyrus (BA45), premotor cortex (BA6), and primary motor cortex (BA4) (study 1). In addition, there existed a significant difference between the two groups in premotor cortex (BA6) in subject mental rotation with mirrored stimuli (study 2). These results suggest that the neural mechanism of higher depression individuals connected with psychomotor retardation exists in the frontal and motor areas when processing object mental rotation with mirrored stimuli, and the motor cortex when processing subject mental rotation.

Father-child dyads exhibit unique inter-subject synchronization during co-viewing of animation video stimuli

Inter-subject synchronization reflects the entrainment of two individuals to each other's brain signals. In parent-child dyads, synchronization indicates an attunement to each other's emotional states. Despite the ubiquity with which parents and their children watch screen media together, no study has investigated synchronization in father-child dyads during co-viewing. The present study examined whether father-child dyads would exhibit inter-subject synchronization that is unique to the dyad and hence would not be observed in control dyads (i.e., randomly paired signals). Hyperscanning fNIRS was used to record the prefrontal cortex (PFC) signals of 29 fathers and their preschool-aged children as they co-viewed children's shows. Three 1-min videos from "Brave", "Peppa Pig" and "The Incredibles" were presented to each dyad and children's ratings of video positivity and familiarity were obtained. Four PFC clusters were analyzed: medial left, medial right, frontal left and frontal right clusters. Results demonstrated that true father-child dyads showed significantly greater synchronization than control dyads in the medial left cluster during the emotionally arousing conflict scene. Dyads with older fathers displayed less synchrony and older fathers, compared to younger ones, exhibited greater activity. These findings suggest unique inter-subject synchronization in father-child dyads during co-viewing which is potentially modulated by parental age.

Viewing Fantastical Events in Animated Television Shows: Immediate Effects on Chinese Preschoolers' Executive Function

Three experiments were conducted to test whether watching an animated show with frequent fantastical events decreased Chinese preschoolers’ post-viewing executive function (EF), and to test possible mechanisms of this effect. In all three experiments, children were randomly assigned to watch a video with either frequent or infrequent fantastical events; their EF was immediately assessed after viewing, using behavioral measures of working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive flexibility. Parents completed a questionnaire to assess preschoolers’ hyperactivity level as a potential confounding variable. In Experiment 1 (N = 90), which also included a control group, there was an immediate negative effect of watching frequent fantastical events, as seen in lower scores on the behavioral EF tasks. In Experiment 2 (N = 20), eye tracking data showed more but shorter eye fixations in the high frequency group, suggesting a higher demand on cognitive resources; this group also did more poorly on behavioral measures of EF. In Experiment 3 (N = 20), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data showed that the high frequency group had a higher concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin (Coxy-Hb), an indicator of higher brain activation consistent with a greater use of cognitive resources; this group also had lower scores on the behavioral EF tasks. The findings are discussed in reference to models of limited cognitive resources.

An optical window into brain function in children and adolescents: A systematic review of functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies

Despite decades of research, our understanding of functional brain development throughout childhood and adolescence remains limited due to the challenges posed by certain neuroimaging modalities. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to elucidate the neural basis of cognitive and socioemotional development and identify the factors shaping these types of development. This article, focusing on the fNIRS methods, presents an up-to-date systematic review of fNIRS studies addressing the effects of age and other factors on brain functions in children and adolescents. Literature searches were conducted using PubMed and PsycINFO. A total of 79 fNIRS studies involving healthy individuals aged 3-17 years that were published in peer-reviewed journals in English before July 2020 were included. Six methodological aspects of these studies were evaluated, including the research design, experimental paradigm, fNIRS measurement, data preprocessing, statistical analysis, and result presentation. The risk of bias, such as selective outcome reporting, was assessed throughout the review. A qualitative synthesis of study findings in terms of the factor effects on changes in oxyhemoglobin concentration was also performed. This unregistered review highlights the strengths and limitations of the existing literature and suggests directions for future research to facilitate the improved use of fNIRS in developmental cognitive neuroscience research.

Children's Reality Status Judgments of Digital Media: Implications for a COVID-19 World and Beyond

Even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, one of the children's most common screen activities was using the video-sharing platform YouTube, with many children preferring YouTube over television. The pandemic has significantly increased the amount of time many children spend on YouTube-watching videos for both entertainment and education. However, it is unclear how children conceptualize the people they see on YouTube. Prior to the pandemic, children 3-8 years old (N = 117) were recruited to participate. Children were told that they would see pictures taken from videos and answer questions about them. Children saw three physical photos with the same image of a man and a bird and were told that the photo was (a) from a video on the experimenter's phone, (b) from a video on television, or (c) from a video on YouTube. They were asked whether the person in the photo was real or not real, which video would be best for learning, and which video they would prefer to watch. Findings indicated that children were marginally less likely to believe that people on YouTube are real than people in a video on a phone, with no difference between beliefs about people on YouTube and television. Notably, these beliefs were similar across the age range tested here. Across all ages, children preferred to watch YouTube more than phone videos and believed that YouTube possessed greater educational value than both phone and television videos.