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The busy social brain: evidence for automaticity and control in the neural systems supporting social cognition and action understanding.

Authors :
Spunt RP
Lieberman MD
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.

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