When I Met my brain: Participating in a neuroimaging study influences children’s naïve mind–brain conceptions

Children who participate in neuroimaging research most likely revise their naïve conceptions about the brain, the mind and their relation. Our aim was to explore this educational effect by comparing two groups of 8-year-old children with and without MRI experiences. Our Mind–Brain Questionnaire allowed us to explore the participants’ naïve conceptions through different cognitive functions. The results revealed that the MRI group had a better understanding than the control group of the relation between the mind and the brain, especially for mental functions (dreaming and imagining), suggesting that the control group had more difficulty materializing the mind into the brain. This relation was less clear for basic (seeing and talking) and scholastic (reading and counting) functions. These results suggest that information regarding neuroimaging studies offers a complementary brain education program that could be implemented in a pedagogical project to encourage opportunities for teaching developmental cognitive neuroscience in classrooms.