The ontogenesis of abstract thought – higher-order representations in the maturing brain

Thinking about the world–what is and what might be–is fundamental to human life. The foundation for this world-understanding is laid in the preschool years of childhood.

Around the age of 4, children begin to reason not only about the real world but also about what is possible or what people believe about the world.

The acquisition of these abstract representations of the world is reflected in a major developmental breakthrough across domains of human cognition. The mechanisms that drive this breakthrough, however, are unknown.

REPRESENT aims to clarify the cognitive and neural foundation of how we, in early childhood, come to represent the world in abstract terms.Based on novel findings, I propose that the maturation of a core network of the human brain–the Default Mode Network–allows children to decouple representations from sensory input and thus entertain several different representations of the world simultaneously.

Increased connectivity to prefrontal regions and coupling to other cognitive networks are proposed to enable children to compute the relation between these representations, providing the foundation for abstract reasoning.REPRESENT will, for the first time, connect multivariate and connectivity methods in early childhood combined with novel task designs to reveal the precise neural representations that underlie reasoning about (a) different beliefs and (b) possibilities and their functional interplay in maturing networks of the brain.

WP1 targets change in these representations and networks in preschool-age as mature abstract reasoning emerges.

WP2 aims to reveal how infants, compared to preschoolers, represent situations involving multiple beliefs or possibilities.This new approach will allow REPRESENT to resolve longstanding questions of how uniquely human abstract thought develops, and how it is implemented in the human brain. This has myriad implications for developmental and cognitive theory, and for our understanding of the human brain.