Meeting of Minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition by David M. Amodio & Chris D. Frith (2006). Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 7, 268-277.

Medial Frontal cortex: 3 divisions1. Orbital (orMFC): BA 14 & 252. Anterior (arMFC): BA 10 & 323. Posterior (prMFC): 24,9 & 8

Social cognition: all the processes that deal with knowledge of the self, perceptions of others including their internal somatic and

mental states, and interpersonal motivations

• Functional divisions of MFC• Pr MFC: Action monitoring – link between (voluntary)

actions and intentions• Ar MFC: Self knowledge, person perception, mentalizing• oMFC: Evaluating social consequences of outcomes

prMFC: evaluating social consequences of one’s actions

• Action monitoring and error correction• Assessment of actions against desires, values, and

goals.• Self-selected actions more so than directed ones

arMFC: Self knowledge, person perception, mentalizing

• Evaluation of self-related traits• Monitoring of one’s emotional state• Thinking about others: as others become more familiar activation

tends to move more to the front (anterior-orbital) of arMFC• Theory of mind: attributing mental states to others

• Cartoon used to measure ‘mentalizing.’

oMFC: Evaluating social consequences of outcomes

• Evaluates and prioritizes outcomes of actions• Rates reward value of stimuli and responses• Deals with outcome itself, more so than the intended or ancipated

outcome . • Focus on degree of regret in various outcomes

• Studies with pain perception suggest that as activation moves more forward pain is less tied to sensory inputs and interpreted more abstractly.

• Anterior activation also found when making judgments about reputation of other’s and self

Role of VLPFC in depression

• ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), roughly BA 44,45 & 47• Source: The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing

complex problems. Paul W Andrews, J Anderson Thomson. Psychological review. 01/08/2009; 116(3):620-54.

Role of VLPFC in depression

• 5HT1A receptor molecule binds to serotonin, thus making serotonin more available to the brain.

• Activity of 5HT1A in VLPFC appears to promote ruminant analytical thinking (common feature of depression)

• Ruminant analytical thinking effective for problem solving especially social problems.

• Depression hypothesized to be “informative” state indicate to person that they have a important, complicated social problem to solve.

• Depressed state facilitates effective ruminate analytical problem solving state.

Primacy of Social Cognition

• Areas of the brain involved in social cognition appear to have higher resting metabolic rate relative to non-social areas of the brain

• These areas are also actively de-activated when non-social cognitive processes take place – something typically not found for other brain areas.

• Continuous readiness for social processing?

Contributions of functional neuroimaging to the study of social cognition, J. P. Mitchell (2008). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12,142-146

Social Psychology concerned with mental states, representations, and mechanisms that underlie social behavior

Social Cognition Strives to understand how the mind operates in a

social context Research based on questions about the mechanisms that support the ability of one human to understand another in terms of the other’s internal mental states

Contributions of functional neuroimaging to the study of social cognition, J. P. Mitchell (2008). Current Directions in Psychological

Science, 12,142-146

• Fundamental Question: Is social cognition a unique form of mental processing or an extension of more basic, non-social forms of thinking?

• Neuroimaging is able to address this question by determining if social cognition requires brain regions that are not involved in non-social types of cognition

Uniquely Social Processes

Support for this Side:•Used to be thought that impression formation was a deeper more elaborate task than nonsocial tasks.

•However in Mitchell, Macrae and Banaji 2004 used functional imaging to suggest different interpretation: Impression formation preferentially engaged regions of the MPFC but the intentional-encoding did not•Moreover activity in this MPFC region correlated with the likelihood that a particular piece of information would later be remembered but only if those items were encountered as part of the impression-formation task.

Same as Non-SocialSupport for this side

Funtional neuroimaging also used to demonstrate that social cognition may at times recruit processes that overlap unexpected with nonsocial tasks.

Saxe and colleagues (2003) demonstrated that the right temporoparietal junction RTPJ region is differentially activated by stories that refer to the content of another person’s erroneous beliefs (rock a precious gem) compared to erroneous physical representations (old photo of New Orleans in 1900).

Two RTPJ regions have been shown to be activated by some mentalizing tasks and during attentional miscuing by a non-social target.

Brain regions involved in social cognition

• Mentalizing- in a social psychology context, it refers to cognitive processes that permit one human to make accurate and rapid inferences about the internal state of another.

• Across a number of studies a few brain regions have been implicated in ‘mentalizing’ tasks:

• Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)

• Temporal-parietal junction (TPJ)

• Precuneous/posterior cingulate cortex

• Superior temporal suclus (STS)

Brain regions involved in social cognition

• MPFC – consistently involved in tasks that require mentalizing or consideration of the motivation, desires, goals, beliefs of another in some action.

• Memory differences also noted: impression-formation tasks usually had better memory than simple memorization of personal description – simply ‘deeper’ processing or different processing?

• MPFC – engaged during impression formation, not during non-social memory tasks.

Brain regions involved in social cognition

• Right temporal/parietal junction – activated when in tasks that require a person to consider another’s erroneous beliefs.

• Also activated in tasks requiring mental reorientation – when person’s attention is diverted from task-relevant location and must be re-oriented.

Brain regions involved in social cognition

• Both anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula are active when observing same experience a certain mental/emotional

state and when the self experiences that same state.

Understanding Others Minds

2 theories:Self-referencing-one can make reasonable models of others minds by accessing and

comparing them to one’s own mental states.

Rule Based- basic body of knowledge and set rules for combining “blocks” ie social grammar

Research supports Self-referencing see pg 145

Primacy of Social Cognition

• Brain seems to highly value social cognition

• All brain areas discussed have a high level of metabolic activity.

• Areas suppressed when doing non-social activities. (support for the unique camp). May suggest that the activities are incompatable with nonsocial cognition.

Functional imaging of “theory of mind” by Helen Gallagher and Christopher Frith (2003). Trends in Cognitive Sciences,

7,3, 77-83.

• Theory of Mind-(TOM) ability to predict other people’s behavior by attributing them to independent mental states. AKA Mentalizing

• Human function: no data from animals; relatively new on evolutionary timeline…(gives general idea that some structures are located in frontal lobe)

• Functional imaging is a relatively new powerful method for studying

neural coordinates for this activity.

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TOM Mechanism

Leslie’s Model •TOM depends on representation of imaginary circumstances “decoupled” or separate from reality.•When trying to predict another person that other’s belief, even when it conflicts with reality, is what determines behavior•These beliefs are determined by the person’s goals.•Scripts record the particular goals and activities that take place in a particular setting ie) classroom script

Brain Areas

• Anterior paracingulate cortex

• Superior temporal sulci STS

• Temporal poles bilaterally

• Supporting roles:

• Amygdala

• Orbitofrontal cortex

Anterior paracingulate cortex(APC)

• Location of cognitive mechanism underpining the ability to represent mental states decoupled from reality.

• Previously: offline tasks-required volunteer to consider scenario and retrospectively explain behavior of person involved.

• Currently: Online tasks require the volunteer to explain the person involved behavior in real time

• Gallagher et al.- rock, paper scissors under 3 conditions that allowed control of other cognitive demands.

– All played under same random system: instructions changed between groups. Opponent believed to be experiementor, rule based comp., random

– Allowed for an intentional stance treat system as an agent and attribute it beliefs and goals.

• Only APC activated in this and cooperative study. What could this mean about the function of other brain areas?

– Involved in reading cues from other person?

Superior temporal sulci STS

• Aids in mentalizing but probably not necessary • Uses the evolutionary pre-cursors from which

mentalizing evolved. • Associated with:

– understanding the meaning of stories involving people (with or without mentalizing)

– Causality and intentionality; trustworthiness– Attributions of intentions to movement of geometric

shapes– Perceptions of body movements, implied movements,

eye movement and gaze– Face-responsiveness

Temporal Poles

• Face recognition in primates

• Episodic memory retrieval of visual and auditory info.

• Stimulated during recollection of familiar faces or voices

• Emotional memory retrieval

• Autobiographical memory retrevial

Supporting Systems

• Amygdala – Automatic activation in response to:– Untrustworthy faces– Socially salient stimuli

• Orbitofrontal cortex– Intentional and unintentional (embarrassing)

violations of social norms– Responds to the aversive reactions of others,

especially anger

Autism and Theory of Mind

•Autism is a biologically based disorder characterized by selective impairment in theory of mind •TOM impairment can account for many of the deficits in communication, socialization, and imagination•Autism research adds support to theory that TOM depends on an innate cognitive mechanism that is possibly dedicated to this specific domain

•See box 1 page 78

ToM test 1

Answers

• Examples of the ToM cartoon stories presented to the subjects. Panels show (A) cooperation, (B) deception, and (C) cooperation/deception. (D) shows an example of a jumbled cartoon story presented in the non-ToM condition. (Lissek et al., PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(4): e2023).

ToM Test 2

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