Deconstructing Theory-of-Mind Impairment in High-Functioning Adults with Autism

Rosenthal, Isabelle; Hutcherson, Cendri A.; Adolphs, Ralph; Stanley, Damian

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.039

Cited by 30 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Yet they may have problems aligning (model-free) and selecting the correct response as well as problems incorporating and inferring the mental state of other people (model-based). Indeed, Rosenthal et al (2019) recently characterized specific impairments in model-based mentalizing among ASD participants, showing that ASD participants demonstrated specific impairments in using their estimates of agent belief to understand agent intentions.…”

Section: Out Of the Loop: Psychopathologies That Involve Impaired Adaptive Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Hertz¹,

Shamay‐Tsoory²

2021

Preprint

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Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this paper we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target in order to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational approaches in feedback-based adaptations (e.g., no feedback, model-free and model-based learning), we propose a framework for understanding how empathic responses are learned based on feedback. In this framework, adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to adapt one’s empathic responses, is a central aspect of empathic skills, and can provide a new dimension to the evaluation and investigation of empathy. By extending existing neural models of empathy, we suggest that adaptive empathy may be mediated by interactions between the neural circuits associated with valuation, shared distress, observation-execution and mentalizing. Finally, we propose that adaptive empathy should be considered as a prominent facet of empathic capabilities with the potential to explain empathic behavior in health and in psychopathology.

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Section: Out Of the Loop: Psychopathologies That Involve Impaired Adaptive Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Hertz¹,

Shamay‐Tsoory²

2021

Preprint

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“…Recent evidence suggests that by disrupting activity in the brain's mentalizing network (C. A. Hill et al, 2017), as noted, or by studying a clinical population with disrupted mentalizing ability (Rosenthal et al, 2019), we can show that mentalizing is necessary for some particular social learning processes. However, this evidence is still extremely limited and preliminary, thus more studies are needed to generalize these finding to a range of observational learning and strategic social interaction tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Computational Approaches to Mentalizing During Observational Learning and Strategic Social Interactions

Charpentier

O’Doherty

2021

The Neural Basis of Mentalizing

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In order to make decisions, we often seek and integrate information coming from other people, while at times also keeping track of the knowledge other people acquire from observing our own actions. In this chapter, we examine the computational mechanisms and the involvement of mentalizing when we learn from observing other people and when we engage in strategic social interactions in which two agents recursively represent each other's beliefs and intentions. We shed light on evidence that regions of the brain's mentalizing system play a key role in implementing these social learning computations, by representing (i) the mental states of other agents, (ii) how these mental states are dynamically updated over time and (iii) how other agents represent our own beliefs and intentions. We argue in favor of using a neuro-computational approach to study these processes, combining computational modelling to identify specific variables predicting behavior and model-based neuroimaging to understand how and where these variables are represented in the brain. We conclude by highlighting some open questions that remain to be addressed to provide a fully integrated account of mentalizing computations during social learning.

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“…It is possible that additional dysfunctional features of network configurations across the whole brain (or whole hemisphere) that we missed in the present study could be revealed by using a task in the scanner directly involving a behavioral response from subjects. On the one hand, task-fMRI data can have the benefit of closely linking the brain with behavior [83]. On the other hand, passive viewing has the advantage of avoiding confounding activation differences that arise merely from different task performances.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reorganization of the Social Brain in Individuals with Only One Intact Cerebral Hemisphere

et al. 2021

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Social cognition and emotion are ubiquitous human processes that recruit a reliable set of brain networks in healthy individuals. These brain networks typically comprise midline (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex) as well as lateral regions of the brain including homotopic regions in both hemispheres (e.g., left and right temporo-parietal junction). Yet the necessary roles of these networks, and the broader roles of the left and right cerebral hemispheres in socioemotional functioning, remains debated. Here, we investigated these questions in four rare adults whose right (three cases) or left (one case) cerebral hemisphere had been surgically removed (to a large extent) to treat epilepsy. We studied four closely matched healthy comparison participants, and also compared the patient findings to data from a previously published larger healthy comparison sample (n = 33). Participants completed standardized socioemotional and cognitive assessments to investigate social cognition. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were obtained during passive viewing of a short, animated movie that distinctively recruits two social brain networks: one engaged when thinking about other agents’ internal mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires, emotions; so-called Theory of Mind or ToM network), and the second engaged when thinking about bodily states (e.g., pain, hunger; so-called PAIN network). Behavioral assessments demonstrated remarkably intact general cognitive functioning in all individuals with hemispherectomy. Social-emotional functioning was somewhat variable in the hemispherectomy participants, but strikingly, none of these individuals had consistently impaired social-emotional processing and none of the assessment scores were consistent with a psychiatric disorder. Using inter-region correlation analyses, we also found surprisingly typical ToM and PAIN networks, as well as typical differentiation of the two networks (in the intact hemisphere of patients with either right or left hemispherectomy), based on idiosyncratic reorganization of cortical activation. The findings argue that compensatory brain networks can process social and emotional information following hemispherectomy across different age levels (from 3 months to 20 years old), and suggest that social brain networks typically distributed across midline and lateral brain regions in this domain can be reorganized, to a substantial degree.

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Deconstructing Theory-of-Mind Impairment in High-Functioning Adults with Autism

Cited by 30 publications

References 36 publications

Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Computational Approaches to Mentalizing During Observational Learning and Strategic Social Interactions

Reorganization of the Social Brain in Individuals with Only One Intact Cerebral Hemisphere

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