其他摘要 | Being aware of others' emotions, understanding their intentions and mental states is an important ability that is essential for the harmony of interpersonal relationships. In psychology, this ability corresponds to the concept of theory of mind (ToM), which has been one of the hot topics of research. In previous studies, many important findings have been obtained about its conceptual connotations, explanatory models and research paradigms. However, the behavioral research paradigm has limitation on the age of subjects and is not applicable to the measurement of the lifetime age range. Besides, different researches still disagreed on the criteria for the components or concepts of ToM. Therefore, the questions of “When the ToM actually occurs?” and “Is there a ToM in early infancy?” and “What are the lifelong developmental patterns of ToM?” still need to be explored in-depth.In recent years, with the development of cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging technology has been increasingly applied to children of all ages, such as infants. Meanwhile, its biological measure indices facilitated the research on the lifespan development of ToM. Therefore, this thesis started from two aspects to explore the unanswered questions in the lifespan ToM development.In the first study, we retrieved previous researches related to ToM in brain imaging, different neuroimaging technology means, and each age group as keywords for the aggregate search. The two components of ToM, namely affective and cognitive ToM (i.e., aToM and cToM), are studied across different age groups. The characteristics and trends of the lifespan ToM development were summarized and integrated based on the previous classical studies.In the second study, we conducted a brain imaging research on the development of key brain areas of ToM derived from the first study. By focusing on early lifelong development (infant: 42-45 gestational weeks) and adulthood (young adult: 22-35 years), we systematically compared the similarities and differences in ToM-related brain networks in the two important lifelong development periods. The findings clearly demonstrated the feasibility of brain imaging for studying the ToM development across the two human lifespan stages.Through a comprehensive combination of the literature on ToM in various age groups, as well as the analysis of Human Connectome Project brain imaging data, the following findings were made: ① In infancy, ToM has already been developed into a certain extent, and the separation of ToM-related brain areas and other perceptual-related brain areas begins to appear, which is earlier than the time point when ToM appears in previous studies. ② In terms of the lifespan ToM development, aToM is developed earlier in the early stages and may have reached its peak in adulthood, while the results for old age are controversial. There is no distinctive feature among different stages. In contrast, cToM is developed more slowly and has more distinctive features at different stages, peaking in adulthood and possibly declining in old age. ③ Overall, the key brain areas or brain networks associated with ToM are the temporo-parietal junction area, medial prefrontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, etc. The activity of these brain regions varies somewhat across ages and in processing different types of theory of mind tasks, but overall they develop in a coherent manner. ④ By mapping the two ToM components’ networks in infants and adults, we demonstrated the differences in the functional brain connectivity patterns of aToM and cTom between infants and adults.In general, based on neuroimaging measurements, this paper supported the lifespan ToM development, and conducted systematic generalization and imaging empirical research on affective and cognitive ToM. In the future, more attention could be paid to the change pattern in the ToM development across the human lifespan. Different ways of delineating the ToM components can be chosen according to their developmental characteristics at different ages, and more neuroimaging technology tools can be integrated to explore the research and to promote the transformation. |
修改评论