Understanding Other Minds; fMRI Investigations

描述（由申请人提供）：人类卓越的社会认知能力依赖于基于对他人思想的理解而推断他人的基本能力。这里提出的工作的具体目标是i)测试我们是否有特殊的（“特定领域”）认知和神经机制来检测和推理其他思想，ii)发现这个系统的功能组织（即，它的主要组成部分是什么？）以及iii)表征正在进行的过程，以及在每个组件中提取的表征。我们的实验将使用功能磁共振成像来识别人类颞叶和额叶皮层中与理解他人思想有关的区域。这项工作的目的不仅仅是发现这些区域的解剖轨迹，而是使用功能磁共振成像来识别和表征系统的功能组成部分。特别是，在第一部分中，我们将测试领域特异性假设，通过询问是否有任何大脑区域在涉及检测或推理其他思想的条件下比在不涉及其他思想但在复杂性，难度和逻辑结构上相匹配的控制条件下更活跃。我们还将测试，当相关刺激信息出现时，是否有任何与检测他人思想有关的候选皮质区域被参与进来，而不受受试者被要求执行的任务的影响（自动性假设）。第二部分和第三部分描述了研究第一部分中确定的系统功能架构的实验，通过测试该系统是否由涉及感知和推理他人思想的各个方面的单一机制组成（单一组件假设），或者它是否由几个功能可分离的组件组成，每个组件在不同的皮层区域实例化（多组件假设）。这些实验还将测试有关每个组成部分功能的特定假设。这里提出的实验构成了第一个广泛基础的努力，利用神经影像学来表征人类认知的核心组成部分之一的功能结构：检测和推理他人的思想。在这里概述的实验进展将为未来的研究提供坚实的基础，探索这些核心系统在日常社会行为中的招募，这些系统在儿童时期的发展，以及该系统在神经系统患者，自闭症和精神病理学中的破坏。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The remarkable human facility with social cognition depends on a foundational ability to reason about other people based on an understanding of their minds. The specific aims of the work proposed here are to i) test whether we have special ("domain specific") cognitive and neural mechanisms for detecting and reasoning about other minds, ii) discover the functional organization of this system (i.e., what are its main components?), and iii) characterize the processes that go on, and the representations that are extracted, in each of these components. Our experiments will use fMRI to identify regions in human temporal and frontal cortex that are involved in understanding other minds. The purpose of this work is not simply to discover the anatomical locus of these regions, but to use fMRI to identify and characterize the functional components of the system. In particular, in Part I the Domain Specificity Hypothesis will be tested, by asking whether any brain regions are more active in conditions that involve detecting or reasoning about other minds than in control conditions that do not involve other minds but that are matched for complexity, difficulty, and logical structure. We will also test whether any candidate cortical regions implicated in detecting other minds are engaged whenever the relevant stimulus information is present, independent of the task the subject is asked to carry out (the Automaticity Hypothesis). Parts II and III describe experiments investigating the functional architecture of the system identified in Part I, by testing whether this system consists of a single mechanism that is involved in all aspects of perceiving and reasoning about other minds (the Single Component Hypothesis), or whether it consists of several functionally dissociable components, each instantiated in a different cortical region (the Multiple Components Hypothesis). These experiments will also test specific hypotheses concerning the function of each component. The experiments proposed here constitute the first broad- based effort to use neuroimaging to characterize the functional architecture of one of the core components of human cognition: detecting and reasoning about other minds. Progress on the experiments outlined here will provide a solid foundation for future research exploring the recruitment of these core systems in everyday social behavior, the development of these systems in childhood, and the disruption of this system in neurological patients, autism, and psychopathology.