Sabbagh M A, Taylor M
University of Oregon, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2000 Jan;11(1):46-50. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00213.
Everyday understanding of human behavior rests on having a theory of mind--the ability to relate people's actions to underlying mental states such as beliefs and desires. It has been suggested that an impaired theory of mind may lie at the heart of psychological disorders that are characterized by deficits in social understanding, such as autism. In this study, we employed the event-related potential methodology to index the activity of neural systems that are engaged during theory-of-mind reasoning in adults. Specifically, neural activity elicited by tasks that required thinking about mental as compared with nonmental representations (i.e., beliefs vs. photographs) was characterized by a focally enhanced positivity over left frontal areas, which was diminished over left parietal areas. These findings provide an important perspective on both children's theory-of-mind development and the neurobiology of disorders in which theory of mind seems to be impaired.
日常对人类行为的理解基于具备心理理论——即把人们的行为与诸如信念和欲望等潜在心理状态联系起来的能力。有人提出，心理理论受损可能是诸如自闭症等以社会理解缺陷为特征的心理障碍的核心所在。在本研究中，我们采用事件相关电位方法来标记成年人在心理理论推理过程中参与的神经系统活动。具体而言，与思考非心理表征（即照片）相比，思考心理表征（即信念）的任务所引发的神经活动的特征是左额叶区域有局部增强的正电位，而在左顶叶区域该正电位减弱。这些发现为儿童心理理论发展以及心理理论似乎受损的障碍的神经生物学提供了重要视角。
