Understanding Other Minds; fMRI Investigations

描述(由申请人提供)：非凡的人类社会认知能力依赖于基于对他人思维的理解而对他人进行推理的基本能力。这里提出的工作的具体目标是：i)测试我们是否有特殊的(“领域特定的”)认知和神经机制来检测和推理其他思维，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)表征在每个这些组成部分中进行的过程和提取的表征。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质中涉及理解其他大脑的区域。这项工作的目的不是简单地发现这些区域的解剖位置，而是使用功能磁共振成像来识别和表征系统的功能组件。特别是，在第一部分中，将通过询问是否有大脑区域在涉及对其他大脑的检测或推理的条件下比在不涉及其他大脑但在复杂性、难度和逻辑结构方面匹配的控制条件下更活跃，来检验领域特异性假说。我们还将测试当相关刺激信息存在时，是否有任何与检测其他大脑有关的候选皮质区域参与其中，而与受试者被要求执行的任务(自动性假设)无关。第二部分和第三部分描述了对第一部分中确定的系统的功能架构进行调查的实验，通过测试这个系统是由一个单一的机制组成，该单一机制涉及对其他思维的感知和推理的所有方面(单一组件假说)，还是它是否由几个功能上可分离的组件组成，每个组件都实例化在不同的皮质区域(多组件假说)。这些实验还将测试有关每个组件功能的具体假设。这里提出的实验是第一次使用神经成像来描述人类认知的核心组成部分之一的功能架构的广泛努力：检测和推理其他大脑。这里概述的实验的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，以及在神经病患者、自闭症和精神病理学中对这些系统的破坏。

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.