The Dorsal Medial Prefrontal Cortex Is Recruited by High Construal of Non-social Stimuli

Abstract

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is part of the mentalizing network, a set of brain regions consistently engaged in inferring mental states. However, its precise function in this network remains unclear. It has recently been proposed that the dmPFC is involved in high-level abstract (i.e., categorical) identification or construction of both social and non-social stimuli, referred to as “high construal.” This was based on the observation of greater activation in the dmPFC shared by a high construal social condition (trait inference based on visually presented behavior) and a high construal non-social condition (categorization of visually presented objects) vs. matched low construal conditions (visual description of the same pictures). However, dmPFC activation has been related to task contexts requiring responses based on self-guided generation of mental content or decisions as compared to responses more directly determined by the experimental context (e.g., free vs. rule-governed choice). The previously reported dmPFC activity may reflect differences in task constraint (i.e., the extent to which the task context guided the process) confounded with the construal manipulation. Therefore, in the present study, we manipulated construal level and constraint independently, while participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As before, participants visually described (low level construal) or categorized (high level construal) pictures of objects. Orthogonal to this, the description or categorization task had to be performed on either one object (low constraint) or on two objects simultaneously (high constraint), limiting the number of possible responses. Statistical analysis revealed common greater activation in both high construal conditions (high and low constraint) than in their low construal counterparts, replicating the influence of construal level on dmPFC activation (greater involvement in high than low construal), but no influence of constraint. In line with previous proposals and earlier work, we suggest that the dmPFC is involved in high-construal abstraction across different domains.

Prefrontal Theta-Phase Synchronized Brain Stimulation With Real-Time EEG-Triggered TMS

“…For this purpose, all subjects underwent MRI using a 3T Siemens PRISMA scanner, with T1- and T2-weighted anatomical sequences, required for the EEG forward model. The neuronavigation system (Localite GmbH, Sankt Augustin, Germany) was used to locate the left DMPFC ( Dunlop et al, 2015 ), identified by the MNI coordinates (−4, 52, 36) ( Baetens et al, 2017 ; Piva et al, 2019 ). Individual MRIs were segmented and meshed using the Fieldtrip toolbox ( Oostenveld et al, 2011 ), which relies on the software packages FreeSurfer and HCP workbench ( Fischl, 2012 ).…”

Prefrontal contributions to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience

“…It is the least well-understood of the default network subcomponents [5,20], and appears to be implicated in conceptual processing [215,[247][248][249] and mentalizing [5,170,215,216,250,251], or thinking about the mental states of others [252]. While the DN SUB3 is often characterized in terms of its sociocognitive functions, research has begun suggesting that the network may be better understood in terms of its involvement in constructive mental simulation in general, of which abstract social cognition is just one [216,247,249,253]. This is also the case for the dorsomedial PFC (dMPFC) node of the DN SUB3 (Fig.…”

The posterior cerebellum supports the explicit sequence learning linked to trait attribution

“…The fact that we also found repetition suppression in the vmPFC for nonsocial judgments may be due to the present stimulus material, which involved object features that required high-level abstractions from the behavioral material. Previous research revealed that the mPFC is activated for inferences, which require high-level abstractions and categorical judgments, across social as well as for nonsocial objects, as long as the construal level is high (Baetens, Ma, Steen, & Van Overwalle, 2014;Baetens, Ma, & Van Overwalle, 2017).…”