Advanced neuroimaging studies of brain networks involved in social cognition

理解他人对于应对日益增长的社会挑战和跨文化冲突至关重要。社会神经科学的最新发现至少集中在这些技能背后的两条不同路线上：一条包含社会情绪的情感-动机路线，如移情；以及一条使人能够理解他人的信仰和意图的社会认知路线(“精神化”)。之前的功能磁共振成像(MRI)研究已经支持这种二分法，并揭示了在这些能力下的两个基本上不重叠的大脑网络。移情通常涉及边缘/边缘旁区域，如前脑岛和前中扣带皮质，而移情则经常涉及以内侧前额叶和颞顶皮质为核心的新皮质集合。 该项目的总体目标是组建一支由学员和研究人员组成的团队，研究共同构成“社会大脑”的不同区域的解剖结构。我们的方法结合了多模式成像、认知和情感的行为评估，以及多变量统计和网络分析。我们将通过整合脑部解剖的高分辨率MRI标记和单个个体的连接，得出一种新的社会认知区域划分。我们将使用功能磁共振任务和大规模的荟萃分析来交叉验证我们的方法，在移情和心理化领域。然后，我们将生成全脑网络描述，并将使用图论方法和模拟来分析这些描述，以量化区域间的隔离和交流。最后，我们将评估我们的方法是否可以为预测个体社会认知能力差异的例程提供信息。 这一多学科课程将提供极好的培训机会，并将促进我们对社会认知的神经解剖学基础的理解。拟议的研究将导致开发一个综合的神经成像和行为测试平台，该平台最终可用于改进诊断程序，并指导临床、教育和企业环境中的干预研究。

Understanding others is essential to deal with growing societal challenges and cross-cultural conflicts. Recent findings in social neuroscience converge on at least two separate routes underlying these skills: an affective-motivational route encompassing social emotions, such as empathy, and a socio-cognitive route that enables understanding others' believes and intentions (“mentalizing”). Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have supported this dichotomy, and revealed two largely non-overlapping brain networks underlying each of these faculties. Empathy often involves limbic/paralimbic areas, such as anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex, while mentalizing frequently engages a neocortical assembly, with medial prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices at its core. The overall goal of this program is to assemble a team of trainees and researchers to study the anatomical organization of the different regions that collectively make up the “social brain”. Our approach combines multimodal imaging, behavioral assessments of cognition and affect, as well as multivariate statistics and network analyses. We will derive a novel parcellation of social cognition regions, by integrating high-resolution MRI markers of brain anatomy and wiring in single individuals. We will cross-validate our approach using functional MRI tasks and large-scale meta-analysis in the domain of empathy and mentalizing. We will then generate whole-brain network descriptions, which will be analyzed using graph theory methods and simulations to quantify inter-regional segregation and communication. Last, we will evaluate whether our approach can inform routines predicting individual differences in social cognitive ability. This multidisciplinary program will provide excellent training opportunities and will advance our understanding of the neuroanatomical basis of social cognition. The proposed research will lead to the development of an integrated neuroimaging and behavioural testing platform, which can ultimately be used to improve diagnostic procedures and to guide intervention studies in clinical, educational, and corporate settings.