A Large-Scale Structural and Functional Connectome of Social Mentalizing

Abstract

Humans have a remarkable ability to infer the mind of others. This mentalizing skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions but how these regions connect and interact is not well understood. Here we leveraged large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data to elucidate the connectome-level organization and brain-wide mechanisms of mentalizing processing. Key features of the mentalizing connectome have been delineated in exquisite detail and its relationship with the default mode network has been extensively scrutinized. Our study demonstrates that mentalizing processing unfolds across functionally heterogeneous regions with highly structured fiber tracts and unique hierarchical functional architecture, which make it distinguishable from the default mode network and other social brain networks.

The social cerebellum: A large-scale investigation of functional and structural specificity and connectivity

“…These results are consistent with the right hemisphere bias of the mentalizing network in the cerebrum (Wang et al 2020), with multiple studies showing both task activity and withincerebrum connectivity lateralized in the right ATL (Gainotti 2007;Olson et al 2007Olson et al , 2013Acres et al 2009;Rice et al 2015) and right TPJ (Saxe and Wexler 2005;Van Overwalle and Baetens 2009;Saxe 2010;Santiesteban et al 2015;Karolis et al 2019). In our study, the ATL displayed this lateralization with the right ATL being significantly connected to all but two left mentalizing cerebellar ROIs.…”

“…This overlap also makes sense given that these tasks contained overlapping features and processes. For instance, the emotion task involved some degree of implicit mentalizing because participants were required to attribute emotion to faces (Wang et al 2020). One could also argue that most language tasks that contain any narrative require mentalizing.…”

“…We used three sets of ROIs for our analyses: one set in the cerebrum and two in the cerebellum. The cerebral brain regions were drawn from prior work on mentalizing (Schurz et al 2014;Wang et al 2020) Schurz and Perner 2015), precuneus (PreC; Cavanna and Trimble 2006;Uddin et al 2007;Schiller et al 2009;Schurz et al 2014;Peer et al 2015), temporoparietal junction (TPJ; Van Overwalle 2009; Koster-Hale and Saxe 2013), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC; (Molenberghs et al 2016;Koster-Hale et al 2017). Although other brain areas support the mentalizing network, we focused on brain areas involved in basic, core social processes.…”

“…This finding is interesting because there has been a concerted effort in social neuroscience over the last twenty years to identify brain areas involved in mentalizing. Researchers have found that the "mentalizing network" is comprised of portions of the temporoparietal junction, precuneus, amygdala, anterior temporal lobe, occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and medial prefrontal cortex (Uddin et al 2007;Lahnakoski et al 2012;Bzdok et al 2013Bzdok et al , 2015Yang et al 2015;Hartwright et al 2016) and these regions are interconnected by a system of white matter pathways (Wang et al 2020). However, with the exception of work by Van Overwalle and colleagues, the cerebellum has been largely ignored by researchers interested in mentalizing and it is not included in the classic mentalizing network.…”

Dynamic and stationary brain connectivity during movie watching as revealed by functional MRI

“…Because the clip mainly includes conversations among the characters, it is not surprising that the auditory cortex dynamically interacts with other cortical areas to pass auditory information to those areas. The temporoparietal junction is thought to be responsible for attributing other’s mental states (Koster-Hale and Saxe, 2013; Wang et al, 2021), which may also be a key component in understanding the conversations in the movie clip. Of course, these brain areas also involve in many other higher-order brain functions.…”