Measuring Mindreading: A Review of Behavioral Approaches to Testing Cognitive and Affective Mental State Attribution in Neurologically Typical Adults

Humans powerfully and flexibly interpret the behaviour of other people based on an understanding of their minds: that is, we use a "theory of mind." In this study we distinguish theory of mind, which represents another person's mental states, from a representation of the simple presence of another person per se. The studies reported here establish for the first time that a region in the human temporo-parietal junction (here called the TPJ-M) is involved specifically in reasoning about the contents of another person's mind. First, the TPJ-M was doubly dissociated from the nearby extrastriate body area (EBA; Downing et al., 2001). Second, the TPJ-M does not respond to false representations in non-social control stories. Third, the BOLD response in the TPJ-M bilaterally was higher when subjects read stories about a character's mental states, compared with stories that described people in physical detail, which did not differ from stories about nonhuman objects. Thus, the role of the TPJ-M in understanding other people appears to be specific to reasoning about the content of mental states. Show more

Human adults conceive of one another as beings with minds, and attribute to one another mental states like perceptions, desires and beliefs. That is, we understand other people using a 'Theory of Mind'. The current study investigated the contributions of four brain regions to Theory of Mind reasoning. The right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) was recruited selectively for the attribution of mental states, and not for other socially relevant facts about a person, and the response of the RTPJ was modulated by the congruence or incongruence of multiple relevant facts about the target's mind. None of the other three brain regions commonly implicated in Theory of Mind reasoning--the left temporo-parietal junction (LTPJ), posterior cingulate (PC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)--showed an equally selective profile of response. The implications of these results for an alternative theory of reasoning about other minds--Simulation Theory--are discussed. Show more

The underlying mechanisms and neuroanatomical correlates of theory of mind (ToM), the ability to make inferences on others' mental states, remain largely unknown. While numerous studies have implicated the ventromedial (VM) frontal lobes in ToM, recent findings have questioned the role of the prefrontal cortex. We designed two novel tasks that examined the hypothesis that affective ToM processing is distinct from that related to cognitive ToM and depends in part on separate anatomical substrates. The performance of patients with localized lesions in the VM was compared to responses of patients with dorsolateral lesions, mixed prefrontal lesions, and posterior lesions and with healthy control subjects. While controls made fewer errors on affective as compared to cognitive ToM conditions in both tasks, patients with VM damage showed a different trend. Furthermore, while affective ToM was mostly impaired by VM damage, cognitive ToM was mostly impaired by extensive prefrontal damage, suggesting that cognitive and affective mentalizing abilities are partly dissociable. By introducing the concept of 'affective ToM' to the study of social cognition, these results offer new insights into the mediating role of the VM in the affective facets of social behavior that may underlie the behavioral disturbances observed in these patients. Show more