People thinking about thinking people. The role of the temporo-parietal junction in "theory of mind".

Full 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.

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Author information

Author/s: Saxe, R (R); Kanwisher, N (N);

Affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NE20-464, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. saxe(-atsign-)mit.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: NeuroImage (Neuroimage), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Aug; vol 19 (issue 4) : pp 1835-42

Dates: Created 2003/09/01; Completed 2003/10/23; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12948738, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Nerve Net - physiology
Oxygen - blood
Parietal Lobe - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Problem Solving - physiology
Social Perception
Speech Perception
Temporal Lobe - physiology
Thinking - physiology
Visual Cortex - physiology

Associated Chemicals: Oxygen (7782-44-7)

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