I know that I know nothing: Cortical thickness and functional connectivity underlying meta-ignorance ability in pre-schoolers

Publication date: Available online 22 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Elisa Filevich, Caroline Garcia Forlim, Carmen Fehrman, Carina Forster, Markus Paulus, Yee Lee Shing, Simone KühnAbstractMetacognition 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 sought for 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. 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, out of sight from the child. The experimenter then asked the child whether she knew which toy was in the box.Children who gave consistently correct answers to this question (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 metacogniti...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research