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

跨文化，合作和亲社会行为是人类社会互动的重要方面。支持亲社会行为的情绪和认知能力及其神经关联相对较好地被理解。移情(即分享他人的情感)、同情(即关心和关心他人的感觉)和心理理论(即从他人的角度出发的能力)与可分离的神经网络相结合，其激活模式允许预测一个人是否会决定帮助另一个人。然而，我们对这些机制在成人发育过程中可能发生的变化知之甚少。自我报告和行为证据表明，人到了老年是有变化的。心理理论下降，而同理心和同情心在老年时保持稳定甚至增加，这反映了与心理理论有关的大脑区域早期结构完整性下降的轨迹。关于老年亲社会行为的证据在很大程度上是不确定的。因此，在第一步，确定与社会情感和认知相关的大脑功能变化是至关重要的。我们将通过在广泛年龄范围(18-85岁；WP1)的大型参与者队列中应用一项全面的、最近验证的自然主义社交任务和功能磁共振成像来实现这一目标。其次，为了阐明亲社会行为与年龄相关的变化，我们将在相同的参与者中使用标准化的社会交换游戏(独裁者游戏的修改版本)，这使得亲社会选择的神经计算模型(WP2)的发展成为可能。考虑到先前结果的多样性，建模方法具有至关重要的优势，即在似乎随着年龄增长的决策过程中，将实际慷慨与噪音分开。最后，利用多变量解码技术，我们的目标是将上述两个数据集联系起来，以确定同理心、同情心和心智理论在成人发展过程中支持亲社会行为的权重--可能会发生变化(WP3)。该提案协同结合了我们在发展和社会神经科学方面的专业知识，我们将在我们的实验室联合培训和交流两名年轻科学家。我们的研究结果将把对社会情感、认知和行为的神经科学研究扩展到终生视角，从而也为发展心理学的理论建设提供参考。

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.