Research using fMRI scans shows tendencies toward kindness When a child is shown a photo of someone accidently hurting himself, portions of the brain are activated which are related to pain. Click here for more information.

Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children.

The responses on the scans were similar to those found in studies of adults. Researchers found that children, like adults, show responses to pain in the same areas of their brains. The research also found additional aspects of the brain activated in children, when youngsters saw another person intentionally hurt by another individual.

“This study is the first to examine in young children both the neural response to pain in others and the impact of someone causing pain to someone else,” said Jean Decety, Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, who reported the findings in the article, “Who Caused the Pain? An fMRI Investigation of Empathy and Intentionality in Children,” published in the currrent issue of Neuropsychologia. Joining him as co-authors were University students Kalina Michalska and Yuko Aktsuki. When a child sees pain intentionally inflicted on another, portions of the brain are activated that are associated with social interaction and moral reasoning in addition to those associated with… Click here for more information.

The programming for empathy is something that is “hard-wired” into the brains of normal children, and not entirely the product of parental guidance or other nurturing, said Decety. Understanding the brain’s role in responding to pain can help researchers understand how brain impairments influence anti-social behavior, such as bullying, he explained.

For their research, the team showed 17 typically developed children, ages seven to 12, animated photos of people experiencing pain, either received accidentally or inflicted intentionally. The group included nine girls and eight boys.

While undergoing fMRI scans, children where shown animations using three photographs of two people whose right hands or right feet only were visible.

The photographs showed people in pain accidently caused, such as when a heavy bowl was dropped on their hands, and situations in which the people were hurt, such as when a person stepped intentionally on someone’s foot. They were also shown pictures without pain and animations in which people helped someone alleviate pain.

The scans showed that the parts of the brain activated when adults see pain were also triggered in children.

“Consistent with previous functional MRI studies of pain empathy with adults, the perception of other people in pain in children was associated with increased hemodymamic activity in the neural circuits involved in the processing of first-hand experience of pain, including the insula, somatosensory cortex, anterior midcigulate cortex, periaqueductal gray and supplementary motor area,” Decety wrote.

However, when the children saw animations of someone intentionally hurt, the regions of the brain engaged in social interaction and moral reasoning (the temporo-parietal junction, the paracigulate, orital medial frontal cortices and amygdala) also were activated.

The study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, provides new insights for children between childrens’ perceptions of right and wrong and how their brains process information, Decety said. “Although our study did not tap into explicit moral judgment, perceiving an individual intentionally harming another person is likely to elicit the awareness of moral wrongdoing in the observer,” he wrote.

Subsequent interviews with the children showed they were aware of wrong-doing in the animations in which someone was hurt. “Thirteen of the children thought that the situations were unfair, and they asked about the reason that could explain this behavior,” Decety said.

If you spotted an anaconda poised to strike, the signal to pay attention would originate in a different part of your brain than if you gazed at an anaconda in the zoo, neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory report in the March 30 issue of Science.

The work, which could have implications for treating attention deficit disorder (ADD), is the first concrete evidence that two radically different brain regions-the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex-play different roles in these different modes of attention.

What’s more, when you focus your attention, the electrical activity in these two brain areas synchronizes and oscillates at different frequencies. “It’s as if the brain is using two different stops on the FM radio dial for different types of attention,” said study co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience. Brain signals related to the knowledge we have acquired about the world are called top-down. Signals related to incoming sensory information are called bottom-up.

“Loud, flashy things like fire alarms automatically grab our attention,” Miller said. “By contrast, we choose to pay attention to certain things we think are important. We found two different modes of brain operation related to each, and they seem to originate in different parts of the brain. Further, the automatic (or bottom-up) versus willful (top-down) modes of attention seem to rely on two different frequency channels in the brain, suggesting that the brain might communicate in different frequency bands for different types of signals.”

ADD involves being overly sensitive to the automatic attention-grabbers and less able to willfully sustain attention. “Our work suggests that we should target different parts of the brain to try to fix different types of attention deficits,” Miller said.

“The downside of most psychiatic drugs is they are too broad,” he continued. “It’s like hitting the problem with a sledgehammer; you get the benefits but also many unintended consequences. Our work suggests that we may one day be able to figure out what is the exact problem with each individual and specifically target those shortcomings. And that is the ultimate goal in psychiatric intervention.”

To address the fact that neural activity from the prefrontal and parietal cortices had never been directly compared, Miller and co-author Timothy J. Buschman, an MIT graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, conducted a series of experiments in which monkeys were engaged in different kinds of tasks. The researchers looked at activity in two areas of their brains simultaneously-the prefrontal cortex, also called the brain’s executive because it is in charge of voluntary behavior, and the parietal cortex, which integrates sensory information coming from various parts of the body.

The monkeys had to pick out rectangles of certain colors and orientations on a video screen. Some of the rectangles popped out at them like the anaconda in the forest; others they had to search for.

The results support the idea that when something pops out at us, sensory cortical areas like the parietal cortex directs our eyes toward the stimulus. When we purposefully look for something, the prefrontal cortex is doing the driving.

“Taken together, these data suggest two modes of operation: When a stimulus pops out, a bottom-up, fast target selection occurs first in the posterior visual cortex; while in search mode, a top-down, longer latency target selection is reflected first in the prefrontal cortex,” Miller said. “To our knowledge, these are the first direct demonstrations that these areas may have different contributions to these different modes of attention.”

This work is supported by the the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and an NSF CELEST Science of Learning Center.