1. Neuroscience

Developmental changes in story-evoked responses in the neocortex and hippocampus

  1. Samantha S Cohen  Is a corresponding author
  2. Nim Tottenham
  3. Christopher Baldassano
  1. Columbia University, United States
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69430
Share this article
Cite this article
  1. Samantha S Cohen
  2. Nim Tottenham
  3. Christopher Baldassano
(2022)
Developmental changes in story-evoked responses in the neocortex and hippocampus
eLife 11:e69430.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69430
  2. Download BibTeX
  3. Download .RIS

Abstract

How does the representation of naturalistic life events change with age? Here we analyzed fMRI data from 414 children and adolescents (5 - 19 years) as they watched a narrative movie. In addition to changes in the degree of inter-subject correlation (ISC) with age in sensory and medial parietal regions, we used a novel measure (between-group ISC) to reveal age-related shifts in the responses across the majority of the neocortex. Over the course of development, brain responses became more discretized into stable and coherent events and shifted earlier in time to anticipate upcoming perceived event transitions, measured behaviorally in an age-matched sample. However, hippocampal responses to event boundaries actually decreased with age, suggesting a shifting division of labor between episodic encoding processes and schematic event representations between the ages of 5 and 19.

Data availability

All neuroimaging data is available at: http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/cmi_healthy_brain_network/sharing_neuro.html, and all behavioral data is available at: https://github.com/samsydco/HBN

The following previously published data sets were used

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Samantha S Cohen

    Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, United States
    For correspondence
    samantha.s.cohen@gmail.com
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3007-5372

  2. Nim Tottenham

    Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. Christopher Baldassano

    Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3540-5019

Funding

Andrew Africk

  • Samantha S Cohen

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish, was obtained from all subjects 18 years and older. Consent was obtained from the parents or legal guardians for participants younger than 18 years. The neuroimaging portion of the study was approved by the Chesapeake Institutional Review Board (https://www.chesapeakeirb.com/). The behavioral experimental procedures were approved by the Columbia University IRB (protocol number AAAS0252, for adult data, and AAAT8550, for child data).

Copyright

© 2022, Cohen et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 1,876
    views
  • 482
    downloads
  • 19
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Samantha S Cohen
  2. Nim Tottenham
  3. Christopher Baldassano
(2022)
Developmental changes in story-evoked responses in the neocortex and hippocampus
eLife 11:e69430.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69430

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69430

Categories and tags

Research organism

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience

    A chromatic feature detector in the retina signals visual context changes

    Larissa Höfling, Klaudia P Szatko ... Thomas Euler
    Research Article

    The retina transforms patterns of light into visual feature representations supporting behaviour. These representations are distributed across various types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), whose spatial and temporal tuning properties have been studied extensively in many model organisms, including the mouse. However, it has been difficult to link the potentially nonlinear retinal transformations of natural visual inputs to specific ethological purposes. Here, we discover a nonlinear selectivity to chromatic contrast in an RGC type that allows the detection of changes in visual context. We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) model on large-scale functional recordings of RGC responses to natural mouse movies, and then used this model to search in silico for stimuli that maximally excite distinct types of RGCs. This procedure predicted centre colour opponency in transient suppressed-by-contrast (tSbC) RGCs, a cell type whose function is being debated. We confirmed experimentally that these cells indeed responded very selectively to Green-OFF, UV-ON contrasts. This type of chromatic contrast was characteristic of transitions from ground to sky in the visual scene, as might be elicited by head or eye movements across the horizon. Because tSbC cells performed best among all RGC types at reliably detecting these transitions, we suggest a role for this RGC type in providing contextual information (i.e. sky or ground) necessary for the selection of appropriate behavioural responses to other stimuli, such as looming objects. Our work showcases how a combination of experiments with natural stimuli and computational modelling allows discovering novel types of stimulus selectivity and identifying their potential ethological relevance.

    1. Neuroscience

    Recording γ-secretase activity in living mouse brains

    Steven S Hou, Yuya Ikegawa ... Masato Maesako
    Tools and Resources

    γ-Secretase plays a pivotal role in the central nervous system. Our recent development of genetically encoded Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based biosensors has enabled the spatiotemporal recording of γ-secretase activity on a cell-by-cell basis in live neurons in culture. Nevertheless, how γ-secretase activity is regulated in vivo remains unclear. Here, we employ the near-infrared (NIR) C99 720–670 biosensor and NIR confocal microscopy to quantitatively record γ-secretase activity in individual neurons in living mouse brains. Intriguingly, we uncovered that γ-secretase activity may influence the activity of γ-secretase in neighboring neurons, suggesting a potential ‘cell non-autonomous’ regulation of γ-secretase in mouse brains. Given that γ-secretase plays critical roles in important biological events and various diseases, our new assay in vivo would become a new platform that enables dissecting the essential roles of γ-secretase in normal health and diseases.

    1. Neuroscience

    Dopamine: Making memories

    Francesco Longo
    Insight

    The neurotransmitter dopamine helps form long-term memories by increasing the production of proteins through a unique signaling pathway.