RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 I know that I don’t know: Structural and functional connectivity underlying meta-ignorance in pre-schoolers
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 450346
DO 10.1101/450346
A1 Elisa Filevich
A1 Caroline Garcia Forlim
A1 Carmen Fehrman
A1 Carina Forster
A1 Markus Paulus
A1 Yee Lee Shing
A1 Simone Kühn
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/22/450346.abstract
AB Research Highlights [1] Children develop the ability to report that they do not know something at around five years of age.[2] Children who could correctly report their own ignorance in a partial-knowledge task showed thicker cortices within medial orbitofrontal cortex.[3] This region was functionally connected to parts of the default-mode network.[4] The default-mode network might support the development of correct metacognitive monitoring.Abstract Metacognition plays a pivotal role in human development. The ability to realize that we do not know something, or meta-ignorance, emerges after approximately five years of age. We aimed at identifying the brain systems that underlie the developmental emergence of this ability in a preschool sample.Twenty-four children aged between five and six years answered questions under three conditions of a meta-ignorance task twice. In the critical partial knowledge condition, an experimenter first showed two toys to a child, then announced that she would place one of them in a box behind a screen, out of sight from the child. The experimenter then asked the child whether or not she knew which toy was in the box.Children who answered correctly both times to the metacognitive question in the partial knowledge condition (n=9) showed greater cortical thickness in a cluster within left medial orbitofrontal cortex than children who did not (n=15). Further, seed-based functional connectivity analyses of the brain during resting state revealed that this region is functionally connected to the medial orbitofrontal gyrus, posterior cingulate gyrus and precuneus, and mid- and inferior temporal gyri.This finding suggests that the default mode network, critically through its prefrontal regions, supports introspective processing. It leads to the emergence of metacognitive monitoring allowing children to explicitly report their own ignorance.We thank Yana Fandakova for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by a Minerva Research Group to YLS from the Max Planck Society. YLS has been funded by the European Union (ERC-2018-StG-PIVOTAL-758898) and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2018–2020). EF and CF are supported by the Volkswagen Foundation (grant number 91620). SK has been funded by two grants from the German Science Foundation (DFG KU 3322/1-1, SFB 936/C7), the European Union (ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804) and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2016-2018). MP has been supported by a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2016 1217 12). The design of the study, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, and the writing of the manuscript was the sole responsibility of the authors.