Familiarity modulates the functional relationship between theory of mind and autobiographical memory

Abstract

Qualitative and quantitative reviews of the neuroimaging literature show that overlapping brain regions support theory of mind (ToM) and autobiographical memory (AM). This overlap has been taken to suggest that individuals draw on past personal experiences to infer others' mental states, but work with amnesic people shows that ToM does not always depend on AM. One variable that may determine the extent to which one relies on AM when inferring another's thoughts and feelings during ToM is whether that individual is personally known. To test this possibility, participants were scanned with fMRI as they remembered past experiences in response to personal photos ('AM' condition) and imagined others' experiences in response to photos of personally familiar ('pToM' condition) and unfamiliar ('ToM' condition) others. Spatiotemporal Partial Least Squares was used to identify the spatial and temporal characteristics of neural activation patterns associated with AM, pToM, and ToM. We found that the brain regions supporting pToM more closely resembled those supporting AM relative to ToM involving unfamiliar others, with the greatest degree of overlap within midline regions. A complementary finding was the observation of striking differences between pToM and ToM such that midline regions associated with AM predominated during pToM, whereas more lateral regions associated with social semantic memory predominated during ToM. Overall, this study demonstrates that ToM involves a dynamic interplay between AM and social semantic memory that is biased towards AM when a personally familiar other is the subject of the mental state inference. KeywordsfMRI; self; other; partial least squares; medial prefrontal cortex; hippocampus Humans possess the remarkable ability to decipher other people's imperceptible mental states, including their thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions. This ability, known as "theory of mind" (ToM), plays an important role in our social lives; it facilitates our capacity to communicate, cooperate, and empathize with others (Amodio & Frith, 2006). The question of how we attribute mental states to others has been a central pursuit in the field of social cognition. One possibility is that humans draw on their own past experiences to infer and simulate the mental states of other people (Buckner & Carroll, 2007;Corcoran, 2001; Gallagher & Frith, 2003). However, patient work shows that ToM does not always depend on the ability to remember past experiences via autobiographical memory (AM; Rosenbaum et al., 2007). One variable that may determine the extent to which one relies on AM to infer another's mental state is one's knowledge of that individual through shared personal experiences. The objective of the current study was to test whether different neural and cognitive mechanisms support mental state inferences of personally familiar versus unfamiliar others and how these abilities relate to AM.Recent qualitative and quantitative reviews of the neuroimaging literature show that the brain regions supporti...

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