Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 364, Issue 1521, Pages 1309-1316Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0318
Keywords
social neuroscience; self; mentalizing
Categories
Funding
- NSF BCS [0642448]
- NIA [R01 AG032780]
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0642448] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Human social cognition relies on an ability to predict what others will think, feel or do in novel situations. Research in social neuroscience has consistently observed several brain regions that contribute ubiquitously to these abilities, including medial prefrontal cortex and aspects of lateral and medial parietal cortex. Interestingly, parallel work has suggested that this same network of regions subserves several seemingly distinct phenomena - notably, the abilities to remember the past, imagine the future and visualize spatial layouts - suggesting the existence of a common set of cognitive processes devoted to projecting oneself into worlds that differ mentally, temporally or physically from one's current experience. This use of self-projection to understand others' minds requires perceivers to solve three distinct cognitive challenges: (i) generating a simulated facsimile of one's own hypothetical mental states in a given situation, (ii) suppressing one's own current mental states, and (iii) deciding on the appropriateness of simulated states for understanding a particular other person. The present paper reviews recent psychology and neuroscience research aimed at understanding the underlying mechanisms that allow humans to solve each of these cognitive challenges to use self-projection to predict and understand the mental states of others.
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