Evidence that the Evoked Response of Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex to Fixation Baseline Periods Facilitates Future Social (But not Nonsocial) Inferential (But not non-Inferential) Judgments
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: People draw inferences about each other with \ngreat efficiency. Such inferences are typically executed in order to refer \ntransient observed behaviors ( e.g.,“smiling”) to relatively more permanent \nunobservable states (e.g.,“friendly”). A large body of evidence has \ndelineated a set of brain regions that are reliably correlated with the performance \nof such mental state inferences: the mentalizing system. Intriguingly, \nthis system shows considerable anatomical overlap with the default \nmode network, so-called because it is exhibits strong, integrated activity \nwhen people are at rest, for instance, duration fixation baseline periods. \nHere, we used fMRI to test the hypothesis that activity of the mentalizing \nsystem during these fixation periods prior to social inferential judgments \nwould increase the efficiency of such judgments. 21 healthy adults underwent \nevent-related fMRI while executing three types of judgments: social \ninferential (evaluating a mental description of a photographed behavior); \nsocial non-inferential (evaluating a motor description of a photographed \nbehavior); or non-social (evaluating an arithmetical expression). Social \ninferential judgments robustly activated the mentalizing system, and many \nof the same areas were robustly de-activated by the non-social task when \ncompared to the fixation baseline periods in between each trial. A parametric \nanalysis of response time revealed that increased activity during these \npre-trial periods in one of these regions, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, was \nassociated with faster response times to accurate social (but not non-social) \ninferential (but not non-inferential) judgments. This provides the best support \nyet for a functional link between default activity of the mentalizing \nsystem and the execution of social inferences. \n
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1873438250