Saxe R, Carey S, Kanwisher N
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Annu Rev Psychol. 2004;55:87-124. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142044.
Evidence from developmental psychology suggests that understanding other minds constitutes a special domain of cognition with at least two components: an early-developing system for reasoning about goals, perceptions, and emotions, and a later-developing system for representing the contents of beliefs. Neuroimaging reinforces and elaborates upon this view by providing evidence that (a) domain-specific brain regions exist for representing belief contents, (b) these regions are apparently distinct from other regions engaged in reasoning about goals and actions (suggesting that the two developmental stages reflect the emergence of two distinct systems, rather than the elaboration of a single system), and (c) these regions are distinct from brain regions engaged in inhibitory control and in syntactic processing. The clear neural distinction between these processes is evidence that belief attribution is not dependent on either inhibitory control or syntax, but is subserved by a specialized neural system for theory of mind.
发展心理学的证据表明，理解他人的心理构成了一个特殊的认知领域，至少包括两个部分：一个早期发展的用于推理目标、感知和情感的系统，以及一个后期发展的用于表征信念内容的系统。神经影像学通过提供以下证据来强化和细化这一观点：(a) 存在用于表征信念内容的特定领域脑区；(b) 这些脑区明显不同于参与目标和行动推理的其他脑区（这表明两个发展阶段反映了两个不同系统的出现，而不是单个系统的细化）；(c) 这些脑区不同于参与抑制控制和句法处理的脑区。这些过程之间明显的神经差异证明，信念归因既不依赖于抑制控制也不依赖于句法，而是由一个专门的心理理论神经系统来支持。
