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The busy social brain: evidence for automaticity and control in the neural systems supporting social cognition and action understanding.
- Source :
-
Psychological science [Psychol Sci] 2013 Jan 01; Vol. 24 (1), pp. 80-6. Date of Electronic Publication: 2012 Dec 06. - Publication Year :
- 2013
-
Abstract
- Much social-cognitive processing is believed to occur automatically; however, the relative automaticity of the brain systems underlying social cognition remains largely undetermined. We used functional MRI to test for automaticity in the functioning of two brain systems that research has indicated are important for understanding other people's behavior: the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system. Participants remembered either easy phone numbers (low cognitive load) or difficult phone numbers (high cognitive load) while observing actions after adopting one of four comprehension goals. For all four goals, mirror neuron system activation showed relatively little evidence of modulation by load; in contrast, the association of mentalizing system activation with the goal of inferring the actor's mental state was extinguished by increased cognitive load. These results support a dual-process model of the brain systems underlying action understanding and social cognition; the mirror neuron system supports automatic behavior identification, and the mentalizing system supports controlled social causal attribution.
- Subjects :
- Adolescent
Adult
Attention physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term physiology
Recognition, Psychology physiology
Video Recording
Visual Perception physiology
Young Adult
Automatism physiopathology
Automatism psychology
Awareness physiology
Brain physiopathology
Comprehension physiology
Emotional Intelligence physiology
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Mirror Neurons physiology
Social Perception
Theory of Mind physiology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 1467-9280
- Volume :
- 24
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- MEDLINE
- Journal :
- Psychological science
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 23221019
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612450884