ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2022
Early and late neural correlates of mentalizing: ALE meta-analyses in adults, children and adolescents.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Consistent neural evidence to support novelty and appropriateness processing for creative thinking: a coordinated meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation.Brain structure & function · 2026Pooled it
- SEE+ computerized classroom-based training enhances 7- to 10-year-olds' socio-emotional cognition through observation and inference.PloS one · 2025Trial
- Inter-brain coupling tracks emotional co-regulation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Brain neuromarkers predict self- and other-related mentalizing across adult, clinical, and developmental samples.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Relationship between attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, mentalization ability, and various digital addictions: a cross-sectional study among university students.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Evolving brain function and connectivity patterns during mentalizing in children and adults.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Social mind at rest: resting-state connectivity associated with social thought relates to friendship quality.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Reading experience reveals shared and idiosyncratic neural patterns during text comprehension.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Neural bases of social facilitation and inhibition: how peer presence affects elementary eye movements.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural Patterns of Social Pain in the Brain-Wide Representations Across Social Contexts.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Neural similarity and interaction success in autistic and non-autistic adolescents.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human cerebellum and social navigation: cerebello-cerebral connectivity using dynamic causal modelling.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Interactive effects of social media use and puberty on resting-state cortical activity and mental health symptoms.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neuro-cognitive specificities in prosocial disobedience: A comparative fMRI study of civilian and military populations.PloS one · 2025Article
- Salience and default networks predict borderline personality traits and affective symptoms: a dynamic functional connectivity analysis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cognitive and affective perspective taking amongst adolescent offenders with variants of callous-unemotional traits.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2024Article
- Identifying the Shared and Dissociable Neural Bases between Self-Worth and Moral Ambivalence.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Neuroanatomical markers of social cognition in neglected adolescents.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Intersubject correlations in reward and mentalizing brain circuits separately predict persuasiveness of two types of ISIS video propaganda.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Common and distinct equity preferences in children and adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to understand mental states of others is referred to as mentalizing and enabled by our Theory of Mind. This social skill relies on brain regions comprising the mentalizing network as robustly observed in adults but also in a growing number of developmental studies. We summarized and compared neuroimaging evidence in children/adolescents and adults during mentalizing using coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses to inform about brain regions consistently or differentially engaged across age categories. Adults (N = 5286) recruited medial prefrontal and middle/inferior frontal cortices, precuneus, temporoparietal junction and middle temporal gyri during mentalizing, which were functionally connected to bilateral inferior/superior parietal lobule and thalamus/striatum. Conjunction and contrast analyses revealed that children and adolescents (N = 479) recruit similar but fewer regions within core mentalizing regions. Subgroup analyses revealed an early continuous engagement of middle medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and right temporoparietal junction in younger children (8-11 years) and adolescents (12-18 years). Adolescents additionally recruited the left temporoparietal junction and middle/inferior temporal cortex. Overall, the observed engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and right temporoparietal junction during mentalizing across all ages reflects an early specialization of some key regions of the social brain.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.