The preterm social brain: altered functional networks for Theory of Mind in very preterm children
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neurodevelopmental difficulties emerge in very preterm born children (<32-week gestation) in infancy and continue to early adulthood but little is known about their social-cognitive development. This study utilized the complementary methodological advantages of both functional MRI and magnetoencephalography to examine the neural underpinnings of Theory of Mind in very preterm birth. Theory of Mind, one of the core social-cognitive skills, is the ability to attribute mental states to others, and is crucial for predicting others' behaviours in social interactions. Eighty-three children (40 very preterm born, 24 boys, age = 8.7 ± 0.5 years, and 43 full-term born, 22 boys, age = 8.6 ± 0.5 years) completed the study. In functional MRI, both groups recruited classic Theory of Mind areas, without significant group differences. However, reduced Theory of Mind connectivity in the very preterm born group was found in magnetoencephalography in distinct theta, alpha and beta-band networks anchored in a set of brain regions that comprise the social brain. These networks included regions such as the angular gyrus, the medial pre-frontal cortex, the superior temporal gyrus and the temporal poles. Very preterm born children showed increased connectivity compared to controls in a network anchored in the occipital gyri rather than classical social-processing regions. Very preterm born children made significantly more attribution errors and mis-construed the social scenarios. Findings offer novel insight into the neural networks, supporting social cognition in very preterm born children and highlight the importance of multimodal neuroimaging to interrogate the social brain in clinical populations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it