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Does the TPJ fit it all? Representational similarity analysis of different forms of mentalizing.

Authors :
Golec-Staśkiewicz K
Pluta A
Wojciechowski J
Okruszek Ł
Haman M
Wysocka J
Wolak T
Source :
Social neuroscience [Soc Neurosci] 2022 Oct; Vol. 17 (5), pp. 428-440. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Oct 30.
Publication Year :
2022

Abstract

Mentalizing is the key socio-cognitive ability. Its heterogeneous structure may result from a variety of forms of mental state inference, which may be based on lower-level processing of cues encoded in the observable behavior of others, or rather involve higher-level computations aimed at understanding another person's perspective. Here we aimed to investigate the representational content of the brain regions engaged in mentalizing. To this end, 61 healthy adults took part in an fMRI study. We explored ROI activity patterns associated with five well-recognized ToM tasks that induce either decoding of mental states from motion kinematics or belief-reasoning. By using multivariate representational similarity analysis, we examined whether these examples of lower- and higher-level forms of social inference induced common or distinct patterns of brain activity. Distinct patterns of brain activity related to decoding of mental states from motion kinematics and belief-reasoning were found in lTPJp and the left IFG, but not the rTPJp. This may indicate that rTPJp supports a general mechanism for the representation of mental states. The divergent patterns of activation in lTPJp and frontal areas likely reflect differences in the degree of involvement of cognitive functions which support the basic mentalizing processes engaged by the two task groups.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1747-0927
Volume :
17
Issue :
5
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Social neuroscience
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
36309870
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2022.2138536