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Decoding others' intentions is a crucial aspect of social cognition. Neuroimaging studies suggest that inferring immediate goals engages the neural system for action understanding (i.e. mirror system), while the decoding of long-term intentions requires the system subserving the attribution of mental states (i.e. mentalizing). A controversial issue, stimulated by recent inconsistent results, concerns whether the two systems are concurrently vs. exclusively involved in intention understanding. This issue is particularly relevant in the case of social interactions, whose processing has been mostly, but not uncontroversially, associated with the mentalizing system. We tested the alternative hypothesis that the relative contribution of the two systems in intention understanding may also depend on the shared goal of interacting agents. To this purpose, 27 participants observed social interactions differing in their cooperative vs. affective shared goal during functional-Magnetic-Resonance-Imaging. The processing of both types of interactions activated the right temporo-parietal junction involved in mentalizing on action goals. Additionally, whole-brain and regions-of-interest analyses showed that the action understanding system (inferior prefrontal-parietal cortex) was more strongly activated by cooperative interactions, while the mentalizing-proper system (medial prefrontal cortex) was more strongly engaged by affective interactions. These differences were modulated by individual differences in empathizing. Both systems can thus be involved in understanding social intentions, with a relative weighting depending on the specific shared goal of the interaction.
Pubmed ID: 22848759
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Resource that discusses MNI brain, and the difference between the MNI brain and the brain in the Talairach atlas. Approaches to converting MNI coordinates to Talairach coordinates and a few other methods for locating your activation are also presented.Matlab function that transforms MNI coordinates to Talaraich coordinates. The inverse function, tal2mni is also available.
View all literature mentionsStimulus delivery and experiment control program. Stimuli include auditory, 2D and 3D visual, and multimodal and experimental data include fMRI, ERP, MEG, psychophysics, eye movements, single neuron recording, and reaction time measures.
View all literature mentionsA toolbox for SPM which provides routines for region of interest analysis. Features include region of interest definition, combination of regions of interest with simple algebra, extraction of data for regions with and without SPM preprocessing (scaling, filtering), and statistical analyses of ROI data using the SPM statistics machinery.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool for automatically scheduling events for rapid-presentation event-related (RPER) fMRI experiments (the schedule is the order and timing of events). Events in RPER are presented closely enough in time that their hemodynamic responses will overlap. This requires that the onset times of the events be jittered in order to remove the overlap from the estimate of the hemodynamic response. RPER is highly resistant to habituation, expectation, and set because the subject does not know when the next stimulus will appear or which stimulus type it will be.
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