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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.

Executive functions are core to multiple aspects of daily cognitive, social and affective functioning. An extensive body of work has charted developmental trajectories and neural substrates of executive functions through the lifespan. Robust associations between executive functions early in life, and later, wellbeing and success has led to considerable efforts to improve executive functions through bespoke interventions. Here, we discuss recent findings on the role of cost-benefit computations in how executive functions are deployed in development. We propose leveraging these insights to design more effective interventions for improving executive functions.

Metacognition refers to a capacity to reflect on and control other cognitive processes, commonly quantified as the extent to which confidence tracks objective performance. There is conflicting evidence about how metacognition changes across the lifespan and it is unknown whether “local” metacognition (monitoring of individual judgments) and “global” metacognition (estimates of self-ability) change. Additionally, the degree to which metacognition generalises across cognitive domains may itself change over time due to increased experience with one’s own abilities. Using a gamified metacognitive task we measured local and global metacognition during performance-controlled memory and visual perception tasks in an age-stratified sample of 304 healthy volunteers (18-83 years; N=50 in each of 6 age groups). We calculated both local and global metrics of metacognition and charted domain-generality with age. Task performance was stable with age. Global self-performance estimates and local metacognitive bias decreased with age, indicating overall lower confidence. Local metacognitive efficiency was unrelated to age and remained correlated across the two cognitive domains. A stability of local metacognition indicates distinct mechanisms contributing to local and global metacognition. Our study provides both a profile of local and global metacognition across the lifespan and a benchmark against which disease-related changes in metacognition can be compared.

Children’s performance on cognitive control tasks predicts a range of real-world outcomes, and has been a primary target for interventions. Such interventions rarely impact other domains (i.e. far transfer); however this may be masked by methodological shortcomings and poorly specified mechanisms of action. Here we focus on a well understood but rarely targeted facet of cognitive control, namely inhibition, using a randomized-control trial with a highly variable, adaptive and complex gamified training protocol in a highly-powered sample of 235 children aged 6-12 years. We found sustained training-related changes in cognitive control as well as improvements in real-world assays of attentional control, which were associated with decreases in functional activity in the inhibition network. Baseline functional activity in the inhibition network also predicted far-transfer to attentional control at post-test and follow-up. This provides a multi-level account of processes and individual differences underpinning successful transfer of cognitive training to real-world outcomes.

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to 11-year-olds using a parametric induction of cognitive effort and three paradigms that each involved decision-making between low- and high-effort options but varied in how explicit effort was made. This included a demand avoidance and an effort discounting paradigm. We also probed cognitive processes linked to effort-related decisions, including task performance, metacognitive accuracy, effort perception, and mental demand. We found that children of all ages were sensitive to parametric modulations of cognitive effort as indicated by self-report. In terms of effort-related decision-making we found that overall children demonstrated no implicit behavioral preference for low effort tasks, that older children stated a preference for low effort tasks, and that all children discounted effort. Further, implicit preference in the demand avoidance paradigm was linked to children's metacognitive insight into how well they could perform effortful tasks. These findings strongly suggest that although children are clearly sensitive to manipulations of cognitive effort, whether and when they use this information to guide their decisions to engage in effortful tasks depends strongly on the extent to which effortful features are made salient to them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

There is ongoing debate on the relationship between intra-individual variability (IIV) of cognitive processes and task performance. While psychological research has traditionally assumed that lower intra-individual variability (IIV) aids consistent task performance, some studies suggest that greater IIV can also be adaptive, especially when flexible responding is required. Here we selectively manipulate two cognitive processes with differing task demands, response speed (Going; simple task) and inhibitory control (Stopping; complex task), by means of a training paradigm and assess how this impacts IIV and its relationship to task performance. A group of 208 6-13-year-old children were randomly allocated to an 8-week training targeting Going (control group) or Stopping (experimental group). The stop signal task was administered before and after training. Training Going led to adaptive reductions in Going IIV, which allows more consistent and efficient Going performance. In contrast, training Stopping led to adaptive increases in Stopping IIV, where greater flexibility in cognitive processing is required to meet higher task demands. These findings provide systematic and causal evidence of the process-dependent relationship of IIV and task performance in the context of Going and Stopping, suggesting a more nuanced perspective on IIV with implications for developmental, ageing and intervention studies.

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 to 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.

Executive functions (EF) are cognitive processes that support flexible goal pursuit. Healthy development of EFs during childhood is critical for later life outcomes including health, wealth and educational attainment. As such it is crucial to understand how EFs can be supported and protected against insult. Here we examine whether there are sensitive periods in the development of EFs, by drawing on deprivation and enrichment studies in humans. While there is suggestive evidence that pre-6 months of age constitutes a sensitive period for EF development, given the higher-order nature of EF, we argue for the possibility of multiple sensitive periods of constituent processes. We identify relevant future questions and outline a research agenda to systematically test for sensitive period in EF development.

A long-standing question in the behavioral sciences is whether cognitive functions can be improved through dedicated training. It is uncontested that training programs can lead to near transfer, meaning increased performance on untrained tasks involving similar cognitive functions. However, whether training also leads to far transfer, meaning increased performance on loosely related untrained tasks or even activities of daily living, is still hotly debated. Here, we review the extant literature and, in particular, the most recent meta-analytic evidence and argue that the ongoing crisis in the field of cognitive-training research may benefit from taking a more mechanistic approach to studying the effectiveness of training. We propose that (a) adopting a more rigorous theoretical framework that builds on a process-based account of training and transfer, (b) considering the role of individual differences in the responsiveness to training, and (c) drawing on Bayesian models of development may help to solve controversial issues in the field and lead the way to designing and implementing more effective training protocols.

Significance The ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and beliefs characterizes the complex social interaction among humans. This ability, called Theory of Mind (ToM), has long been argued to develop around 4 y when children start explicitly reasoning about others' beliefs. However, when tested nonverbally, infants already show action expectations congruent with others’ beliefs before the age of 2 y. Do these behaviors reflect different systems for understanding others’ minds—an early and a later developing one—or when does ToM develop? We show that these abilities are supported by the maturation of independent brain networks, suggesting different systems for explicit verbal ToM and early nonverbal action expectations., 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.

Rewards have a profound impact on human motivation, cognition, affect and behavior. The study of reward processing and the effects of incentives thus occupies a central place in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. A core assumption when comparing groups or individuals is that reward types are valued equally. Here we test the validity of this assumption in a sample of 26 adults 23 children (7-11 years) using both primary (i.e. pleasant taste) and secondary rewards (i.e. money). We show that adults value money more than pleasant tastes, while children value them equally, a developmental pattern replicated across three distinct tasks including subjective valuation, willingness to exert cognitive effort, and the invigorating effects on cognitive control. Our findings suggest that money increases in value with age, presumably with experience, and warrant caution when interpreting group differences in reward processing, at least in a developmental framework. Future work should expand to using incentives that are appropriate to the groups under investigation.

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.

This chapter reviews the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social development during middle childhood. The author focuses on social abilities (e.g., theory of mind and empathy) and prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing and helping). The chapter discusses studies and theories on developmental changes in these social phenomena and references evidence of neurocognitive underpinnings where available. The author argues that changes in social development during childhood can best be explained in developments in regulatory processes, such as behavioral control, emotion regulation, conflict processing, and self-other control. The author refers to this cluster of functions as social control mechanisms. Changes in these social control mechanisms are driven by the maturation of neural circuitry comprising prefrontal cortical regions and their interactions with subcortical regions. Crucially, while the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social development are distinct for different abilities and behaviors, it appears to be domain-general processes that predominantly shape social development during middle childhood.

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., Moses‐Payne et al investigated how advice taking develops during childhood and adolescence, and how this is related to metacognition. Children, 8‐9 year olds (yo), and two groups of adolescents, 12‐13 year olds and 16‐17 year olds, took part in a metacognition and advice taking task. Both adolescent groups showed increased ability to identify when they were correct or incorrect (increased metacognitive efficiency, Panel A). The adolescent groups also showed a lower propensity to follow advice than children (Panel B). Importantly, adolescents were less likely to follow false advice but still followed helpful advice (Panel C). In this way, adolescents were more competent advice takers, and this was linked to their metacognitive abilities: resistance to false advice was driven by adolescents' increased metacognitive efficiency (Panel D). The adolescents utilized their new‐found metacognitive abilities to resist false advice from others when they knew they were correct, but still took helpful advice when they knew they were incorrect.

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., Using drift diffusion modelling, we investigated the contributions of automatic and controlled attentional processes to attentional biases towards negative stimuli and their association with paediatric anxiety in children aged 5‐11. Higher anxiety was associated with higher accuracy (a) and the diffusion modelling parameter ‘drift rate’ (b). This was specific to the trials showing fearful faces in 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.

The potential to train social capacities could have wide-ranging positive effects for society and may be particularly relevant to clinical conditions in which social challenges impact on well-being and quality of life. Yet, the study of whether and how social skills can be trained has been neglected until recently. This chapter provides an overview of the most recent studies which have sought to train social abilities across different developmental populations. An overview is first provided of socio-cognitive (theory of mind) and socio-affective (empathy, compassion) processes, after which studies seeking to enhance these skills are reviewed. Studies are divided into those that directly target the particular skill or seek to enhance it by targeting an associated function. The neural mechanisms associated with training and impact on prosocial behaviours are highlighted, and methodological implications are discussed throughout. Overall, studies suggest training social capacities may be effective; however, further research will be needed to clarify the precise methodological features that lead to training success.

Human social preferences are the product of gene-culture coevolution, and rely on predispositions that emerge early in development. These social preferences encompasse distinct motivations, mechanisms, and behaviors, that facilitate social cohesion and cooperation. Developmental social neuroscience critically contributes in elucidating the proximate mechanisms involved in social decision-making and prosociality, and their gradual maturation in interaction with the social and cultural environment.

The potential to train social capacities could have wide-ranging positive effects for society, and may be particularly relevant to clinical conditions in which social challenges impact on wellbeing and quality of life. Yet, the study of whether and how social skills can be trained has been neglected until recently. This chapter provides an overview of the most recent studies which have sought to train social abilities across different developmental populations. An overview is first provided of socio-cognitive (Theory of Mind) and socio-affective (Empathy, Compassion) processes, after which studies seeking to enhance these skills are reviewed. Studies are divided into those that directly target the particular skill, or seek to enhance it by targeting an associated function. The neural mechanisms associated with training and impact on prosocial behaviours are highlighted, and methodological implications are discussed throughout. Overall, studies suggest training social capacities may be effective, however further research will be needed to clarify the precise methodological features that lead to training success.

Computational modelling can be used to precisely characterise 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 pediatric 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. Increased anxiety was associated with higher 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.

Knowing how the world works is critical for successfully navigating it. This requires two key components: knowledge about the world and the computational capacity to plan flexibly. Children are inherently limited in both domains but building a better understanding of the world is a functional imperative for development. To examine how youths overcome their constraints, we asked 107 children (8-9 years), early (12-13 years) and late adolescents (16-17 years) to perform a planning task. We find that children gather significantly more information before making a decision compared to adolescents, but only if it does not come with explicit costs. Using computational modelling, we find that this is because children have limited planning abilities, which they counteract by reduced subjective sampling costs. Our findings thus demonstrate how children level out their computational constraints by deploying excessive information gathering, a developmental feature that could inform aberrant information gathering in psychiatric disorders.

In the version of this Article originally published, in Fig. 2c the hatching indicating antisocial behaviour was on the wrong data bars. This has now been corrected in the Article.

During childhood and adolescence, exploring the unknown is important to build a better model of the world. This means that youths have to regularly solve the exploration-exploitation trade-off, a dilemma in which adults are known to deploy a mixture of computationally light and heavy exploration strategies. In this developmental study, we investigated how youths (aged 8 to 17) performed an exploration task that allows us to dissociate these different exploration strategies. Using computational modelling, we demonstrate that tabula-rasa exploration, a computationally light exploration heuristic, is used to a higher degree in children and younger adolescents compared to older adolescents. Additionally, we show that this tabula-rasa exploration is more extensively used by youths with high attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. In the light of ongoing brain development, our findings show that children and younger adolescents use computationally less burdensome strategies, but that an excessive use thereof might be a risk for mental health conditions.

There is a popular appeal to the idea that learning to play an instrument could make one better at languages or that playing chess improves one's social skills. Does learning from experience generalize from one context to another? If so, what are the mechanisms that underpin such transferability? These questions are central to advancing our understanding of the extraordinary adaptability of the human species. They get at fundamental issues of our cognitive architecture and how we learn.

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. published

Highlights • This is the first study to investigate the development of response inhibition focussing on variability. • We examined intraindividual variability both in stopping latencies and the underlying neural circuitry. • There were no developmental differences in mean response inhibition, yet clear differences in performance variability. • This, in turn, was associated with developmental differences in brain signal variability. • Behavioral and neural variability indices might be a more sensitive measure of developmental differences in 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.

Experiencing and observing social exclusion and inclusion, as well as prosocial behavior, are important aspects of social relationships in childhood. However, it is currently unknown to what extent these processes and their neural correlates differ in heritability. We investigated influences of genetics and environment on experiencing social exclusion and compensating for social exclusion of others with the Prosocial Cyberball Game using fMRI in a twin sample (aged 7–9; N = 500). Neuroimaging analyses (N = 283) revealed that experiencing possible self-exclusion resulted in activity in inferior frontal gyrus and medial prefrontal cortex, which was influenced by genetics and unique environment. Experiencing self-inclusion was associated with activity in anterior cingulate cortex, insula and striatum, but this was not significantly explained by genetics or shared environment. We found that children show prosocial compensating behavior when observing social exclusion. Prosocial compensating behavior was associated with activity in posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, and showed unique environmental effects or measurement error at both behavioral and neural level. Together, these findings show that in children neural activation for experiencing possible self-exclusion and self-inclusion, and for displaying prosocial compensating behavior, is accounted for by unique environmental factors and measurement error, with a small genetic effect on possible self-exclusion.

Highlights • Significant improvement in belief-related anticipation between the ages of 3 and 4. • Children did not anticipate belief-related actions correctly until the age of 4 years. • Correct anticipation only when the agent believed the object to be in its last location., 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.

N.S. was supported by the European Research Council (European Research Council (ERC) grant agreement no. 715282, project DEVBRAINTRAIN), as well as a Jacobs Research Fellowship. J.C. was supported in part by the ERC (grant agreement no. 609819, project SOMICS). N.B.-G. was supported by an FPU scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education (ref. FPU12/00409). When misfortune befalls another, humans may feel distress, leading to a motivation to escape. When such misfortune is perceived as justified, however, it may be experienced as rewarding and lead to motivation to witness the misfortune. We explored when in human ontogeny such a motivation emerges and whether the motivation is shared by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and four- to six-year-old children learned through direct interaction that an agent was either prosocial or antisocial and later saw each agent’s punishment. They were given the option to invest physical effort (chimpanzees) or monetary units (children) to continue watching. Chimpanzees and six-year-olds showed a preference for watching punishment of the antisocial agent. An additional control experiment in chimpanzees suggests that these results cannot be attributed to more generic factors such as scene coherence or informational value seeking. This indicates that both six-year-olds and chimpanzees have a motivation to watch deserved punishment enacted. Postprint

The prevalence of psychosocial stress in Western societies is constantly on the rise. Its influence on social decision-making, however, remains poorly understood. Whereas, it is known that stress triggers psychological and physiological defense mechanisms, indications of such patterns in social decisions are ambivalent. We sought to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of stress-induced social decisions. We recruited 145 men, who were individually exposed to either a psychosocial stressor or a control condition, while primed with affiliation by interacting either with members of an in- or an out-group. We found that stressed participants were less trusting and engaged in less costly punishment compared to the non-stressed control group. Interacting with out-group members led to less reciprocity and more spiteful punishment. There was no interaction between stress and the affiliation conditions in any of the used social-decision-making paradigms. Lastly, while stress-reactive cortisol levels had no effect on trust behavior, higher baseline cortisol was correlated with greater trust. Our findings suggest that previous ambiguities in data reported on the influence of stress on social decisions, namely tend-and-befriend behavior may have arisen through critical social confounds in the induction of stress. When controlling for potential social confounds, stress may trigger fight-or-flight behavior as indicated by increased social anxiety. These findings highlight the considerable context-dependence of psychosocial stress and its effects on social behavior.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) shows deficits in self-other distinction during theory of mind (ToM). Here we investigated whether ASD patients also show difficulties in self-other distinction during empathy and if potential deficits are linked to dysfunctional resting-state connectivity patterns. In a first study, ASD patients and controls performed an emotional egocentricity paradigm and a ToMtask. In the second study, resting-state connectivity of right temporo-parietal junction and right supramarginal gyrus(rSMG) were analysed using a large-scale fMRI data set. ASD patients exhibited deficient ToM but normal emotional egocentricity, which was paralleled by reduced connectivity of regions of the ToM network and unimpaired rSMG network connectivity. These results suggest spared self-other distinction during empathy and an intact rSMG network in ASD.

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.

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.

Observing social exclusion can be a distressing experience for children that can be followed by concerns for self-inclusion (self-concerns), as well as prosocial behavior to help others in distress (other-concerns). Indeed, behavioral studies have shown that observed social exclusion elicits prosocial compensating behavior in children, but motivations for the compensation of social exclusion are not well understood. To distinguish between self-concerns and other-concerns when observing social exclusion in childhood, participants (aged 7-10) played a four-player Prosocial Cyberball Game in which they could toss a ball to three other players. When one player was excluded by the two other players, the participant could compensate for this exclusion by tossing the ball more often to the excluded player. Using a three-sample replication (N = 18, N = 27, and N = 26) and meta-analysis design, we demonstrated consistent prosocial compensating behavior in children in response to observing social exclusion. On a neural level, we found activity in reward and salience related areas (striatum and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)) when participants experienced inclusion, and activity in social perception related areas (orbitofrontal cortex) when participants experienced exclusion. In contrast, no condition specific neural effects were observed for prosocial compensating behavior. These findings suggest that in childhood observed social exclusion is associated with stronger neural activity for self-concern. This study aims to overcome some of the issues of replicability in developmental psychology and neuroscience by using a replication and meta-analysis design, showing consistent prosocial compensating behavior to the excluded player, and replicable neural correlates of experiencing exclusion and inclusion during middle childhood.

This paper reviews the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying prosocial development in childhood. I begin by arguing that most prosociality is costly. This cost needs to be regulated for prosocial behavior to occur. The precise regulatory mechanisms depend on the type of prosocial behavior and include behavioral control in the case of sharing and emotion regulation in the case of helping. I review evidence that these regulatory mechanisms are subserved by prefrontal cortical circuitry, which depending on the mechanism interacts with different brain regions coding for self-related and other-related affect to produce prosocial behavior. I conclude that the maturation of prefrontal cortical circuitry drives the development of both sharing and helping in childhood through supporting the emergence of relevant regulatory mechanisms.