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

在各种文化中，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感和认知能力及其神经关联已经得到了较好的理解。同理心（即分担他人的影响）、同情心（即关心他人的感觉）和心智理论（即站在他人角度考虑问题的能力）涉及可分离神经网络，其激活模式可以预测一个人是否会决定帮助他人。然而，对于这些机制如何在成人发展过程中发生变化，我们所知甚少。自我报告和行为证据表明，老年时有变化。心智理论会衰退，而同理心和同情心会保持稳定，甚至随着年龄的增长而增加，这反映了与心智理论有关的大脑区域早期结构完整性下降的轨迹。有关老年人亲社会行为的证据在很大程度上尚无定论。因此，在第一步，确定与社会影响和认知相关的功能性大脑变化是至关重要的。为了实现这一目标，我们将在一个年龄范围广（18-85岁；WP1）的大型参与者队列中应用一个全面的、最近验证的、自然的社会任务和功能磁共振成像。其次，为了阐明亲社会行为的年龄相关变化，我们将在同一参与者中采用标准化的社会交换游戏（修改版本的独裁者游戏），这使得亲社会选择的神经计算模型得以发展（WP2）。考虑到先前结果的多样性，建模方法具有将决策过程中的实际慷慨度与噪音（似乎随着年龄的增长而增加）区分开来的关键优势。最后，利用多元解码技术，我们的目标是将上述两个数据集联系起来，以明确在整个成人发展过程中，移情、同情和心理理论在促进亲社会行为方面的潜在变化权重（WP3）。该提案协同结合了我们在发育和社会神经科学方面的专业知识，我们将在我们的实验室共同培训和交换两名年轻科学家。我们的研究结果将把社会影响、认知和行为的神经科学研究扩展到生命周期的角度，从而也为发展心理学的理论建设提供信息。

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.