Journal
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 9, Issue 6, Pages 817-824Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nst048
Keywords
mentalizing; theory of mind; mPFC; construal level
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is consistently involved in tasks requiring the processing of mental states, and much rarer so by tasks that do not involve mental state inferences. We hypothesized that the dmPFC might be more generally involved in high construal of stimuli, defined as the formation of concepts or ideas by omitting non-essential features of stimuli, irrespective of their social or non-social nature. In an fMRI study, we presented pictures of a person engaged in everyday activities (social stimuli) or of objects (non-social stimuli) and induced a higher level of construal by instructing participants to generate personality traits of the person or categories to which the objects belonged. This was contrasted against a lower level task where participants had to describe these same pictures visually. As predicted, we found strong involvement of the dmPFC in high construal, with substantial overlap across social and non-social stimuli, including shared activation in the vmPFC/OFC, parahippocampal, fusiform and angular gyrus, precuneus, posterior cingulate and right cerebellum.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available