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Theresa W. Cheng's Supporting Area Project

Theresa W. Cheng's Supporting Area Project

The few studies investigating neural correlates of mentalizing and social-self-evaluation among adolescents suggest that both perspective-taking and its neural foundations are developing during adolescence. Understanding both individual differences in, and changes in, perspective-taking tendencies as they relate to neural activation of mentalizing regions during social-self-evaluation among adolescents may offer a novel means of understanding pathways to, and individual differences in, health and well-being in adolescence. This project asks the following questions: Do behavioral perspective-taking tendencies correlate with age in adolescent girls*? Does activation in mentalizing regions (dmPFC, vmPFC, rTPJ, lTPJ, and precuneus) during social-self-evaluation correlate with age in adolescent girls*? Do girls* with greater perspective-taking tendencies elicit greater activity in mentalizing regions during social-self-evaluation? Do latent changes in tendencies to take others’ perspectives correlate with latent changes in neural activation of mentalizing regions during social-self-evaluation? 174 girls* aged 10.00-12.99 years (*at study enrollment, 171 identified as female and 3 as non-binary) participated in a longitudinal study on social and neural development. At each of 2 waves (18 months apart), the participants completed a self-report of perspective-taking tendencies, and a social-self-evaluation fMRI task in which they decided whether 50 traits relevant to social status and relationships describe them, as well as a high-level control condition. Analyses will be pre-registered; preprocessing will be performed with fMRIPrep, first-level models will be run with SPM12, and multi-level models and bivariate latent change score analysis (Kievet et al., 2018) will be conducted in R. Scripts will be made available at https://github.com/dsnlab/TAG_scripts. This abstract does not present preliminary results to limit the negative consequences of running interim analyses.

Testing long-term phasic modeling hypotheses using data from the Transitions in Adolescent Girls study

A part of the Transitions in Adolescent Girls study (https://osf.io/5r4mv/) from the DSN Lab (https://osf.io/bkwyb/) Outdated version of this project: https://osf.io/t9ukf/

Prior research has examined fear of negative evaluation in the context of social anxiety, with the impact it has on self-referential processing and social evaluation being largely understudied. To examine this gap in literature, we utilized a self and social evaluative task that was administered to a sample of adolescent girls (N = 70). In this task, participants were asked to create a three-minute introduction video where they describe themselves. These videos were later cut into short 10-20 second clips. Additionally, participants were told that “another girl” (a confederate) their age had created a similar video and while they are in a MRI scanner, their screens would either be connected with the other girls’, meaning they would both be watching the same clip at the same time, or their screens would be disconnected, meaning they would be watching their own clips. Participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire that measures fear of negative evaluation and a brief questionnaire asking what they thought of their own video. This study looks at the association between fear of negative evaluation and change in neural activity when the “other girl” and participant are both viewing the participants’ video compared to when the participant is viewing their own video. We expect a difference in activation of cortical midline structures (CMS) between these two conditions, with the magnitude of this contrast being explained by individual differences in fear of negative evaluation. While we specifically expect to see differences in CMS, we will perform a whole-brain exploratory analysis to extract group-level ROIs that reflect differences in self vs. other evaluation. These ROIs will be interrogated to look at individual differences in the correlation between fear of negative evaluation and mean BOLD response. Understanding the difference in neural mechanisms between social and self-evaluation has implications for adolescent emotional and psychosocial development.

© 2021 American Neurological Association, Objective: Knowing explicitly where we are is an interpretation of our spatial representations. Reduplicative paramnesia is a disrupting syndrome in which patients present a firm belief of spatial mislocation. Here, we studied the largest sample of patients with delusional misidentifications of space (i.e. reduplicative paramnesia) after stroke to shed light on their neurobiology. Methods: In a prospective, cumulative, case-control study, we screened 400 patients with acute right-hemispheric stroke. We included 64 cases and 233 controls. First, lesions were delimited and normalized. Then, we computed structural and functional disconnection maps using methods of lesion-track and network-mapping. The maps were compared, controlling for confounders. Second, we built a multivariate logistic model including clinical, behavioural and neuroimaging data. Finally, we performed a nested cross-validation of the model with a support-vector machine analysis. Results: The most frequent misidentification subtype was confabulatory mislocation (56%), followed by place reduplication (19%) and chimeric assimilation (13%). Our results indicate that structural disconnection is the strongest predictor of the syndrome and included two distinct streams, connecting right fronto-thalamic and right occipito-temporal structures. In the multivariate model, the independent predictors of reduplicative paramnesia were the structural disconnection map, lesion sparing of right dorsal fronto-parietal regions, age and anosognosia. Good discrimination accuracy was demonstrated (area under the curve = 0.80[0.75-0.85]). Interpretation: Our results localize the anatomical circuits that may have a role in the abnormal spatial-emotional binding and in the defective updating of spatial representations underlying reduplicative paramnesia. This novel data may contribute to better understand the pathophysiology of delusional syndromes after stroke., The authors acknowledge our colleagues from the Department of Neurology and from the Language Research Laboratory for their contribution to patient screening. This work received funding from “PRÉMIO JOÃO LOBO ANTUNES” – SCML (grant to P.N.A.), from “Bolsa de Investigação em Doenças Vasculares Cerebrais 2017”–SPAVC (grant to P.N.A.) and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 818521 to M.T.S.).“Data were provided in part bythe Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium(Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and KamilUgurbil; 1U54 MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.

The past decade has seen growing concern about research practices in cognitive neuroscience, and psychology more broadly, that shake our confidence in many inferences in these fields. We consider how these issues affect developmental cognitive neuroscience, with the goal of progressing our field to support strong and defensible inferences from our neurobiological data. This manuscript focuses on the importance of distinguishing between confirmatory versus exploratory data analysis approaches in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Regarding confirmatory research, we discuss problems with analytic flexibility, appropriately instantiating hypotheses, and controlling the error rate given how we threshold data and correct for multiple comparisons. To counterbalance these concerns with confirmatory analyses, we present two complementary strategies. First, we discuss the advantages of working within an exploratory analysis framework, including estimating and reporting effect sizes, using parcellations, and conducting specification curve analyses. Second, we summarize defensible approaches for null hypothesis significance testing in confirmatory analyses, focusing on transparent and reproducible practices in our field. Specific recommendations are given, and templates, scripts, or other resources are hyperlinked, whenever possible.