Functional Organization of Social Perception and Cognition in the Superior Temporal Sulcus

Abstract

The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is considered a hub for social perception and cognition, including the perception of faces and human motion, as well as understanding others' actions, mental states, and language. However, the functional organization of the STS remains debated: Is this broad region composed of multiple functionally distinct modules, each specialized for a different process, or are STS subregions multifunctional, contributing to multiple processes? Is the STS spatially organized, and if so, what are the dominant features of this organization? We address these questions by measuring STS responses to a range of social and linguistic stimuli in the same set of human participants, using fMRI. We find a number of STS subregions that respond selectively to certain types of social input, organized along a posterior-to-anterior axis. We also identify regions of overlapping response to multiple contrasts, including regions responsive to both language and theory of mind, faces and voices, and faces and biological motion. Thus, the human STS contains both relatively domain-specific areas, and regions that respond to multiple types of social information.

Perceiving social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus

“…The pSTS face region has remained an intriguing mystery ever since it was shown to respond threefold more strongly to dynamic faces than to static faces (34), and to respond equally to videos of faces and recordings of voices (31,33,39). Here we found that this region also shows some sensitivity to both the presence and nature of social interactions depicted with point-light displays and animated shapes, implicating this region in the perception of third-party social interactions.…”

“…Relationship to nearby ROIs. We next asked how the SI-fROI compares in location and response profile to established nearby regions engaged in other social tasks, namely the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ) (29,30) and the right pSTS "face" region [referred to as such because that is the contrast by which it is defined, even though this region is now known to respond similarly to voices (31)(32)(33)]. To define these fROIs, we ran standard face (34) and theory of mind (35) localizers and used a similar group-constrained subject-specific method as described above.…”

“…To assess to the extent to which our three pSTS ROIs overlap with one another, we calculated the overlap between each pair of fROIs with respect to each of the two ROIs: size(A,B)/size(A) and size(A,B)/size(B), representing the proportion of one region that is overlapping with the other region (33). To examine the extent to which these regions represent distinct information, we excluded overlapping voxels from subsequent analyses.…”

Using Functional Neuroimaging to Refine the Diagnostic Construct of Borderline Personality Disorder

“…Both the STS and TPJ have long been understood to play central roles in ToM, and in particular, developing a working understanding of other people's intentions [61,63]. The STS is a central neural hub for social cognition processing, key for understanding other's actions and intentions, as well as perceiving human faces and motion [64].…”

How the brain represents other minds

“…A fuller description of how the brain represents mental states would need to trace the flow of information from social perception [seeing people behave in certain ways, known to be represented in specific regions of association cortex (8)] to what is presumably a series of neural representations that comprise the transformation from perception to the inference of mental states. The representations revealed in the present study are explicit representations that correspond to how we talk and think about mental states.…”