The Neural Representation of Self Is Recapitulated in the Brains of Friends: A Round-Robin fMRI Study
The Neural Representation of Self Is Recapitulated in the Brains of Friends: A Round-Robin fMRI Study
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DOI：
10.1037/pspa0000178
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发表时间：
2020-03-01
影响因子：
7.6
通讯作者：
Wagner, Dylan D.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chavez, Robert S.;Wagner, Dylan D.
基于思想、情感和信仰的公开，人类不断形成和更新对彼此身份的印象。同时，个体对自己的自我概念也有特定的信念和认识。十多年来的社会神经科学研究表明，检索关于自我和他人的信息会占用内侧前额叶皮层（MPFC）的相似区域，然而，一个人对自我的神经表征是否会反映在熟悉的其他人的大脑中，或者这两种表征没有共同的关系，目前还不清楚。在这里，我们在一个紧密联系的朋友网络中检查了这个问题，因为他们参与了一个循环特征评估任务，每个参与者既是感知者又是其他参与者的目标，此外还评估了他们自己。利用功能性核磁共振成像和多层次建模方法，我们发现在一个人的自我参照思维过程中，MPFC的多体素大脑活动模式与朋友在想到同一个人时的活动模式是相关的。此外，神经自我-他人模式的相似性本身与自我-他人特征判断评级的相似性正相关，这是在单独的会话中测量的行为。这些发现表明，个人感知的准确性可能取决于与个人思考自我概念相关的大脑活动模式在他人大脑中的反映程度。
Humans continually form and update impressions of each other's identities based on the disclosure of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. At the same time, individuals also have specific beliefs and knowledge about their own self-concept. Over a decade of social neuroscience research has shown that retrieving information about the self and about other persons recruits similar areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), however it remains unclear if an individual's neural representation of self is reflected in the brains of well-known others or if instead the two representations share no common relationship. Here we examined this question in a tight-knit network of friends as they engaged in a round-robin trait evaluation task in which each participant was both perceiver and target for every other participant and in addition also evaluated their self. Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC during a person's self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person. Moreover, the similarity of neural self-other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self-other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session. These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others.