Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of “theory of mind” in story comprehension

Abstract

The ability of normal children and adults to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict behaviour ("theory of mind") has been a focus of much recent research. Autism is a biologically based disorder which appears to be characterised by a specific impairment in this "mentalising" process. The present paper reports a functional neuroimaging study with positron emission tomography in which we studied brain activity in normal volunteers while they performed story comprehension tasks necessitating the attribution of mental states. The resultant brain activity was compared with that measured in two control tasks: "physical" stories which did not require this mental attribution, and passages of unlinked sentences. Both story conditions, when compared to the unlinked sentences, showed significantly increased regional cerebral blood flow in the following regions: the temporal poles bilaterally, the left superior temporal gyrus and the posterior cingulate cortex. Comparison of the "theory of mind" stories with "physical" stores revealed a specific pattern of activation associated with mental state attribution: it was only this task which produced activation in the medial frontal gyrus on the left (Brodmann's area 8). This comparison also showed significant activation in the posterior cingulate cortex. These surprisingly clear-cut findings are discussed in relation to previous studies of brain activation during story comprehension. The localisation of brain regions involved in normal attribution of mental states and contextual problem solving is feasible and may have implication for the neural basis of autism.

Neural substrates of narrative comprehension and memory

“…Most commonly, narrative-level mechanisms are isolated by contrasting brain activation when reading connected sentences or stories with activation when reading sentences or stories that are unrelated or inconsistent to varying degrees (e.g., Ferstl et al, 2005;Ferstl andvon Cramon, 2001, 2002;Fletcher et al, 1995;Giraud, 2000;Hasson et al, 2007;Vogeley et al, 2001;Xu et al, 2005). The results of such investigations converge on a distributed network of cortical regions subserving discourse-level comprehension.…”

Right-hemispheric brain activation correlates to language performance

“…The role of the inferior frontal lobe (specifically Broca"s area) and the posterior superior temporal gyrus (Wernicke"s area) in language processing is extensively researched and exceeds the straightforward view of a division between language accessing and production as summarized by Geschwind (Geschwind, 1965;Bookheimer, 2002;Price, 2000;Hickok and Poeppel, 2004). The frontal temporal lobe has been shown to be active during sentence reading (Fletcher et al, 1995), albeit not consistently (Price et al, 2003) and is involved in name retrieval (Damasio et al, 2004). Conventional word retrieval paradigms also trigger activation in the left temporal gyrus (Wise et al, 2001;Damasio et al, 2004).…”

Narrative speech production: An fMRI study using continuous arterial spin labeling

“…Several studies have used fMRI to monitor the appreciation of narrative coherence, finding that bilateral medial and lateral frontal and anterior temporal regions are activated while listening to a narrative relative to baselines involving rest or unrelated sentences (Fletcher et al, 1995;Gallagher, 2000;Mazoyer et al, 1993;Xu, Kemeny, Park, Frattali, & Braun, 2005). A more explicit approach to the evaluation of narrative reported left medial prefrontal activation during explicit judgments of the coherence of pairs of sentences (Ferstl et al, 2002) or coherence judgments depending on the presence of definite articles (Robertson et al, 2000).…”