Successful human social life requires imagining what others believe or think to understand and predict behavior. This ability, often referred to as theory of mind, reliably engages a specialized network of temporal and prefrontal brain regions in older children and adults, including selective recruitment of temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). To date, how and when this specialized brain organization for ToM arises is unknown due to limitations in functional neuroimaging at younger ages. Here we employed the emerging technique of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure the functional brain response across the parietal, temporal, and prefrontal regions in 7-month old male and female infants as they viewed different video scenarios of a person searching for a hidden object. Over different conditions, we manipulated whether the person held an accurate (true) or inaccurate (false) belief about the location of the hidden object in the videos. In two separate experiments, we observed that the TPJ, but not other temporal and prefrontal regions, spontaneously tracked with the beliefs of the other person, responding more during scenarios when the other person’s belief regarding the location of the object was false compared to scenarios when her belief was true. These results mirror those obtained with adults to show that the TPJ already shows some functional organization relevant to high-level social cognition by around 7-months. Furthermore, these results suggest that infants may draw on similar core mechanisms to implicitly track beliefs as adults do when explicitly reasoning about them.
Comparison of Brain Activation Patterns during Olfactory Stimuli between Recovered COVID-19 Patients and Healthy Controls: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Study
