Deciphering cognitive and affective neural correlates of prosocial decision making in adult development

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Across cultures, cooperation and prosocial behavior are crucial aspects of human social interaction. The emotional and cognitive capacities enabling prosocial behavior and their neural correlates are relatively well understood. Empathy (i.e. the sharing of others’ affect), compassion (i.e. feelings of care and concern for others) and theory of mind (i.e. the capacity to take others’ perspective) engage separable neural networks, whose activation patterns allow predicting whether a person will decide to help another or not. We know considerably less, however, about how these mechanisms may change across adult development. Self-report and behavioral evidence suggests that there are changes in old age. Theory of mind declines, while empathy and compassion remain stable or even increase in old age, mirroring the trajectories of earlier declining structural integrity in brain regions involved in theory of mind. The evidence on prosocial behavior in old age is largely inconclusive. It is therefore crucial to, in a first step, identify the functional brain changes associated with social affect and cognition. We will achieve this goal by applying a comprehensive, recently validated, naturalistic social task and functional magnetic resonance imaging in a large participant cohort with a wide age range (18-85 years; WP1). Second, to elucidate age-related changes in prosocial behavior, we will employ a standardized social exchange game (modified version of the dictator game) in the same participants, which enables the development of a neuro-computational model of prosocial choice (WP2). Given the diversity in prior results, a modeling approach has the crucial advantage of separating actual generosity from noise in the decision process that seems to increase with age. Lastly, making use of multivariate decoding techniques, we aim to link the two datasets described above to specify the – potentially changing – weights of empathy, compassion and theory of mind in enabling prosocial behavior across adult development (WP3). The proposal synergistically combines our expertise in developmental and social neuroscience and we will jointly train and exchange two young scientists across our laboratories. Our results will expand neuroscientific research on social affect, cognition and behavior to a lifespan perspective, thereby also informing theory-building in developmental psychology.