Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 19, Issue 4, August 2003, Pages 1835-1842
NeuroImage

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People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00230-1Get rights and content

Abstract

Humans powerfully and flexibly interpret the behaviour of other people based on an understanding of their minds: that is, we use a “theory of mind.” In this study we distinguish theory of mind, which represents another person’s mental states, from a representation of the simple presence of another person per se. The studies reported here establish for the first time that a region in the human temporo-parietal junction (here called the TPJ-M) is involved specifically in reasoning about the contents of another person’s mind. First, the TPJ-M was doubly dissociated from the nearby extrastriate body area (EBA; Downing et al., 2001). Second, the TPJ-M does not respond to false representations in non-social control stories. Third, the BOLD response in the TPJ-M bilaterally was higher when subjects read stories about a character’s mental states, compared with stories that described people in physical detail, which did not differ from stories about nonhuman objects. Thus, the role of the TPJ-M in understanding other people appears to be specific to reasoning about the content of mental states.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

We devised a new version of the false belief stories task (Fletcher et al., 1995) to compare reasoning about true and false beliefs to reasoning about non-social control situations. ToM stories described a character’s action caused by his/her false belief. Descriptions of human actions required analysis of mental causes, in the absence of false beliefs. We compared these conditions to two non-social control conditions, (1) mechanical inference control stories, which required the subject to

Methods

Twenty-five healthy right-handed adults (12 women) volunteered or participated for payment. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and gave informed consent to participate in the study.

Subjects were scanned in the Siemens 1.5-(9 subjects) and 3.0-T (16 subjects) scanners at the MGH-NMR center in Charlestown, MA, using a head coil. Standard echoplanar imaging procedures were used [TR = 2 s, TE = 40 (3 T) or 30 (1.5 T) ms, flip angle 90°]. Twenty 5-mm-thick near-coronal slices

Results

Average reading times for theory of mind and mechanical inference stories did not differ significantly (ToM = 6.4 s, MI = 6.5 s, P > 0.2).

Random effects analyses of 25 subjects revealed five loci of greater activation during the theory of mind compared with mechanical inference stories (P < 0.05 corrected for multiple spatial hypotheses): left and right TPJ-M, left and right anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS), and precuneus (Table 1, Fig. 1). [Consistent with many previous studies

Discussion

Experiment 1 thus shows an increased BOLD response in a region of the TPJ bilaterally, here called the TPJ-M, during ToM compared with mechanical inference stories. This activation is robust and reliable across individual subjects. This finding replicates the earlier reports with a new set of stimuli, a less biased task (no cues), and with more stringent statistical tests (both individual subject analyses and random effects group analyses). Our results confirm that the TPJ-M response to verbal

Experiment 2

The results of Experiment 1 established that bilateral regions near the TPJ show a greater increase in BOLD signal when subjects reason about others’ mental states, than when they reason about nonhuman objects. However, in Experiment 1, stories involving people and mental states were compared with stories that involve neither people nor mental states. In Experiment 2, we asked which of these two components was responsible for the observed activation. We directly compared the response of the

Methods

Twenty-one naive right-handed subjects (11 women) were scanned at 1.5 T, using twenty 5-mm-thick axial slices that covered the whole brain. An additional 7 subjects from Experiment 1 (4 women) also participated in part of Experiment 2. All were scanned at 3.0 T using twenty 5-mm-thick near-coronal slices (parallel to the brainstem) covering most of the occipital lobe and the posterior portion of the temporal and parietal lobes.

Story stimuli consisted of 70 stories (12 each of false belief,

Results

Subjects were slower when responding to questions about false photograph than false belief stories (FB: 2.6 vs. FP: 2.8 s, P < 0.01), making it unlikely that false belief inferences were simply more difficult.

As predicted, a random effects analysis on the 21 subjects who underwent whole brain scanning revealed regions of increased BOLD signal to false belief compared with false photograph stories (P < 0.0001, uncorrected) at the TPJ bilaterally [right: (54 −51 18), left: (−48 −63 33)],

Discussion

The results of Experiment 2 confirm that the TPJ-M shows an increased response to stimuli that invite ToM reasoning compared with logically similar nonsocial controls (false photograph stories). Second, the TPJ-M does not show an increased response to the mere presence of a person in the stimulus (physical people stories). The right and left TPJ-M responses to physical people stories did not differ, thus resolving the ambiguity of the apparently lateralized response to photographs of bodies in

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by grants NEI 13455 and NIHM 66696. Our thanks especially to Yuhong Jiang for comments and conversation, and to Ben Balas, Robb Rutledge, Miles Shuman, and Amal Dorai for help with data collection and analysis.

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