Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

Abstract

Abstract■ An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., "scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature"). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition-medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the "mind" of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities. ■

Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind networks with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli

“…Thus, as in the current data, two different localizers identify the same region, but activate different sub-populations within that region. More generally, distinct sub-populations within the same ToM region may contain information about distinct features or aspects of mental states (Contreras et al, 2013; Skerry and Saxe, 2015). A promising strategy for future research is therefore to identify brain regions implicated in ToM using a localizer task, and then directly study the information represented in those regions using more minimal experimental manipulations and finer grained analysis techniques like multivoxel pattern analyses and representational similarity analyses (Haxby et al, 2014; Kriegeskorte, 2008; Kriegeskorte and Kievit, 2013).…”

Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind

“…For instance, medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, and temporal poles have been argued to implement, respectively, a decoupling between representations of the world and of other minds, processing of biological motion and agency, and semantic knowledge of social scripts [46]. One can add additional components that could serve functions such as differentiating ToM about other individuals or about groups (a distinction found in multivoxel patterns of fMRI activation within shared regions [47]), or that could add modulatory biases accounting for individual differences in dimensions such as egocentricity bias [48]. It is clear that even a partially complete picture would look orders of magnitude more complex than the sparse sketch we show in Figure 3; but it is also clear that eventually such a dense picture will be required to do justice to the complexity of the original construct of ToM.…”

Distinct neural correlates of social categories and personality traits

“…In contrast to the wealth of theories and research in the behavioral literature on the role of social categories and personality traits during impression formation (Andersen et al, 1990;Hamilton and Sherman, 1996;Kunda and Thagard, 1996;Fiske and Neuberg, 1990;Brewer, 1988), direct comparisons between these two types of constructs are, to the best of our knowledge, much less investigated in current social neuroscientific research. Some studies have touched upon related topics, such as the difference between categorization and individuating processes in the brain (Mason & Macrae, 2004), stereotypical judgments (Quadflieg et al, 2009), trait and evaluative representations during stereotype judgments (Gilbert et al, 2012), and inferring mental states from groups (Contreras et al, 2013).…”