The link between social cognition and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex
The link between social cognition and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex
复制标题
DOI：
10.1162/0898929055002418
复制
发表时间：
2005-08-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Macrae, CN
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Mitchell, JP;Banaji, MR;Macrae, CN
内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）与看似不同的认知功能有关，例如理解他人的思想和处理有关自我的信息。如果人类用自己的经验来推断他人的心理状态，这是模拟理论的基本假设，那么这种功能重叠是可以预料到的。当参与者关注一系列其他人的精神或身体方面时，测量了他们的神经活动。为了验证模拟理论的预测，即基于自我反思的推论只适用于相似的人，研究人员随后根据目标与自己的相似程度对其进行了评级。参数分析显示腹侧mpfc的一个区域——先前与自我参照任务有关——其活动与感知到的自我/他人相似性相关，但仅适用于心智化试验。这些结果表明，当他人与自己足够相似时，自我反思可以用来推断他们的精神状态。
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as understanding the minds of other people and processing information about the self. This functional overlap would be expected if humans use their own experiences to infer the mental states of others, a basic postulate of simulation theory. Neural activity was measured while participants attended to either the mental or physical aspects of a series of other people. To permit a test of simulation theory's prediction that inferences based on self-reflection should only be made for similar others, targets were subsequently rated for their degree of similarity to self. Parametric analyses revealed a region of the ventral mPFC-previously implicated in self-referencing tasks-in which activity correlated with perceived self/other similarity, but only for mentalizing trials. These results suggest that self-reflection may be used to infer the mental states of others when they are sufficiently similar to self.