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While mounting evidence shows promising effects of brain training on cognitive functioning in healthy and pathological conditions, the spread of variable training approaches highlights the need to compare their efficacy and identify their neural correlates, representing possible targets for neuromodulation treatments. We performed coordinate-based functional magnetic resonance imaging meta-analyses to compare the neural correlates and the cognitive outcomes of cognitive (n = 22), physical (n = 22), and meditative (n = 20) training in healthy non-expert individuals. Pre/post-training cognitive metrics improved after cognitive and physical training, but their heterogeneity, or even the lack of these measurements in some studies, highlights the need of more structured protocols. Cognitive, physical, and meditative interventions increased brain activity in distinct fronto-medial areas likely mediating training effects on cognitive, action, and attentional control, respectively. The modular, training-specific, engagement of a region that is known to mediate feedback-based learning provides cues for boosting brain training via combined interventions that might jointly outperform their individual effects., (© 2023 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

While the discussion on the foundations of social understanding mainly revolves around the notions of empathy, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing, their degree of overlap versus specificity is still unclear. We took a meta-analytic approach to unveil the neural bases of cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy, both in healthy individuals and pathological conditions characterized by social deficits such as schizophrenia and autism. We observed partially overlapping networks for cognitive and affective mentalizing in the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and lateral temporal cortex, while empathy mainly engaged fronto-insular, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex. Adjacent process-specific regions in the posterior lateral temporal, ventrolateral, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex might underpin a transition from abstract representations of cognitive mental states detached from sensory facets to emotionally-charged representations of affective mental states. Altered mentalizing-related activity involved distinct sectors of the posterior lateral temporal cortex in schizophrenia and autism, while only the latter group displayed abnormal empathy related activity in the amygdala. These data might inform the design of rehabilitative treatments for social cognitive deficits., (© 2021 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

While the action observation and mentalizing networks are considered to play complementary roles in understanding others' goals and intentions, they might be concurrently engaged when processing social interactions. We assessed this hypothesis via three activation-likelihood-estimation meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies on the neural processing of: (a) social interactions, (b) individual actions by the action observation network, and (c) mental states by the mentalizing network. Conjunction analyses and direct comparisons unveiled overlapping and specific regions among the resulting maps. We report quantitative meta-analytic evidence for a "social interaction network" including key nodes of the action observation and mentalizing networks. An action-social interaction-mentalizing gradient of activity along the posterior temporal cortex highlighted a hierarchical processing of interactions, from visuomotor analyses decoding individual and shared intentions to in-depth inferences on actors' intentional states. The medial prefrontal cortex, possibly in conjunction with the amygdala, might provide additional information concerning the affective valence of the interaction. This evidence suggests that the functional architecture underlying the neural processing of interactions involves the joint involvement of the action observation and mentalizing networks. These data might inform the design of rehabilitative treatments for social cognition disorders in pathological conditions, and the assessment of their outcome in randomized controlled trials., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Decoding the meaning of others' actions, a crucial step for social cognition, involves different neural mechanisms. While the "mirror" and "mentalizing" systems have been associated with, respectively, the processing of biological actions versus more abstract information, their respective contribution to intention understanding is debated. Processing social interactions seems to recruit both neural systems, with a different weight depending on cues emphasizing either shared action goals or shared mental states. We have previously shown that observing cooperative and affective social interactions elicits stronger activity in key nodes of, respectively, the mirror (left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), superior parietal cortex (SPL), and ventral/dorsal premotor cortex (vPMC/dPMC)) and mentalizing (ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)) systems. To unveil their causal organization, we investigated the effective connectivity underlying the observation of human social interactions expressing increasing cooperativity (involving left pSTS, SPL, and vPMC) versus affectivity (vmPFC) via dynamic causal modeling in 36 healthy human subjects. We found strong evidence for a model including the pSTS and vPMC as input nodes for the observed interactions. The extrinsic connectivity of this model undergoes oppositely valenced modulations, with cooperativity promoting positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and both SPL (forward) and vPMC (mainly backward), and affectivity promoting reciprocal positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and vmPFC (mainly backward). Alongside fMRI data, such divergent effective connectivity suggests that different dimensions underlying the processing of social interactions recruit distinct, although strongly interconnected, neural pathways associated with, respectively, the bottom-up visuomotor processing of motor intentions, and the top-down attribution of affective/mental states., (© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Psychological studies of deductive reasoning have shown that subjects' performance is affected significantly by the content of the presented stimuli. Specifically, subjects find it easier to reason about contexts and situations with a social content. In the present study, the effect of content on brain activation was investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects were solving two versions of the Wason selection task, which previous behavioral studies have shown to elicit a significant content effect. One version described an arbitrary relation between two actions (Descriptive: "If someone does ..., then he does ..."), whereas the other described an exchange of goods between two persons (Social-Exchange: "If you give me ..., then I give you ..."). Random-effect statistical analyses showed that compared to baseline, both tasks activated frontal medial cortex and left dorsolateral frontal and parietal regions, confirming the major role of the left hemisphere in deductive reasoning. In addition, although the two reasoning conditions were identical in logical form, the social-exchange task was also associated with right frontal and parietal activations, mirroring the left-sided activations common to both reasoning tasks. These results suggest that the recruitment of the right hemisphere is dependent on the content of the stimuli presented.