Neural Activity during Natural Viewing of Sesame Street Statistically Predicts Test Scores in Early Childhood

Neural activity that is evoked naturalistically in children during educational television viewing can be used to predict math and verbal knowledge. It is not currently possible to measure the real-world thought process that a child has while observing an actual school lesson. However, if it could be done, children's neural processes would presumably be predictive of what they know. Such neural measures would shed new light on children's real-world thought. Toward that goal, this study examines neural processes that are evoked naturalistically, during educational television viewing. Children and adults all watched the same Sesame Street video during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Whole-brain intersubject correlations between the neural timeseries from each child and a group of adults were used to derive maps of “neural maturity” for children. Neural maturity in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region with a known role in basic numerical cognition, predicted children's formal mathematics abilities. In contrast, neural maturity in Broca's area correlated with children's verbal abilities, consistent with prior language research. Our data show that children's neural responses while watching complex real-world stimuli predict their cognitive abilities in a content-specific manner. This more ecologically natural paradigm, combined with the novel measure of “neural maturity,” provides a new method for studying real-world mathematics development in the brain. Author Summary: In the real world, children learn new information by participating in classrooms, interacting with their family and friends, and watching educational videos. While previous neuroimaging research has typically used simple tasks and short-lasting stimuli, in this study we examined brain development using a more complex and naturalistic educational stimulus. Children and adults all watched the same Sesame Street video as we measured their neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examined the timecourses of neural activity over the length of the video for children and adults. We found that the degree to which children showed adult-like brain responses was correlated with their math and verbal knowledge levels. In the intraparietal sulcus, children's neural correlation with adults depended on their mathematics knowledge whereas in Broca's area, it depended on their verbal knowledge. Additional experiments showed that children's neural responses in the intraparietal sulcus are selectively driven by numerical content both when children are watching Sesame Street and when they engage in a number matching task. These convergent results highlight the broad role of the intraparietal sulcus in processing numerical information. In addition, our study validates the use of naturalistic stimuli and child-to-adult neural timecourse correlations for studying brain development. We suggest that this new approach can enrich our understanding of how children's brains process information in the real world.