Thinking about seeing: Perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults

Abstract

Blind people's inferences about how other people see provide a window into fundamental questions about the human capacity to think about one another's thoughts. By working with blind individuals, we can ask both what kinds of representations people form about others’ minds, and how much these representations depend on the observer having had similar mental states themselves. Thinking about others’ mental states depends on a specific group of brain regions, including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). We investigated the representations of others’ mental states in these brain regions, using multivoxel pattern analyses (MVPA). We found that, first, in the RTPJ of sighted adults, the pattern of neural response distinguished the source of the mental state (did the protagonist see or hear something?) but not the valence (did the protagonist feel good or bad?). Second, these neural representations were preserved in congenitally blind adults. These results suggest that the temporo-parietal junction contains explicit, abstract representations of features of others’ mental states, including the perceptual source. The persistence of these representations in congenitally blind adults, who have no first-person experience with sight, provides evidence that these representations emerge even in the absence of first-person perceptual experiences.

Response patterns in the developing social brain are organized by social and emotion features and disrupted in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder

“…Because the multivariate results overall look very similar in adults and children (Experiment 1), the small correlations observed between neural and model RDMs are likely due to experimental limitations, rather than reflecting challenges specific to the pediatric data. While collecting a large amount of data within individual child participants is inherently difficult, future studies may benefit from developing stimuli that target specific features or dimensions of mental states Koster-Hale et al, 2014;.…”

“…Multivariate approaches have recently been employed to characterize within-category distinctions in neural population responses (Cohen et al, 2017;Kriegeskorte & Kievit, 2013;Kriegeskorte, Mur, & Bandettini, 2008;Norman, Polyn, Detre, & Haxby, 2006). While most prevalent in studies of the ventral visual stream (e.g., Haxby et al, 2001, several fMRI studies of adults have used multivariate methods to discover features of mental states that evoke distinct patterns of activity in ToM brain regions (Carter, Bowling, Reeck, & Huettel, 2012;Koster-Hale, Bedny, & Saxe, 2014;Koster-Hale et al, 2017;Koster-Hale, Saxe, Dungan, & Young, 2013;Tamir, Thornton, Contreras, & Mitchell, 2016), and to test hypotheses about the content and structure of representations about other people (Hassabis et al, 2013;Thornton & Mitchell, 2017b;2017a), and their emotions (Jastorff, Huang, Giese, & Vandenbulcke, 2015;J. Kim et al, 2015;Peelen, Atkinson, & Vuilleumier, 2010;Thornton, Weaverdyck, & Tamir, 2019).…”

For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue

“…But one can understand the meanings of the word couch and determine its synonyms: a cardinal ability enabled by semantics (Chierchia, 2006). This is the ability that allows the blind to wield rich concepts, even those about vision-such as shiny or bright-of which they have no sensory experience (Koster-Hale, Bedny, & Saxe, 2014;Landau & Gleitman, 1988;Shepard & Cooper, 1992). Thus, one can separate conceptual from sensory aspects of knowledge by looking at populations where the sensory component is not available-as in the case of concepts in the blind.…”

Emerging Phenomenological and Biological Principles of Consciousness: Top Insights of Prevailing Models, Concepts, and Observations

“…People born blind have no first-hand understanding of what it is like to have vision, and if they somehow acquired working retinas later in life, the brains of those congenitally blind patients would receive a flood of visual stimuli that they are not prepared to handle [118]. However, due to the brain's amazing ability to identify informational patterns and dynamic neuroplastic ability to restructure existing cortex with a different active role, those congenitally blind patients with restored vision can learn to truly see, even without a retina or occipital lobe (potentially all) [119] [120].…”