Shamay-Tsoory Simone G, Aharon-Peretz Judith
Department of Psychology and Brain & Behavior Center, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Neuropsychologia. 2007 Oct 1;45(13):3054-67. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.021. Epub 2007 Jun 13.
The underlying mechanisms and neuroanatomical correlates of theory of mind (ToM), the ability to make inferences on others' mental states, remain largely unknown. While numerous studies have implicated the ventromedial (VM) frontal lobes in ToM, recent findings have questioned the role of the prefrontal cortex. We designed two novel tasks that examined the hypothesis that affective ToM processing is distinct from that related to cognitive ToM and depends in part on separate anatomical substrates. The performance of patients with localized lesions in the VM was compared to responses of patients with dorsolateral lesions, mixed prefrontal lesions, and posterior lesions and with healthy control subjects. While controls made fewer errors on affective as compared to cognitive ToM conditions in both tasks, patients with VM damage showed a different trend. Furthermore, while affective ToM was mostly impaired by VM damage, cognitive ToM was mostly impaired by extensive prefrontal damage, suggesting that cognitive and affective mentalizing abilities are partly dissociable. By introducing the concept of 'affective ToM' to the study of social cognition, these results offer new insights into the mediating role of the VM in the affective facets of social behavior that may underlie the behavioral disturbances observed in these patients.
心理理论（ToM），即推断他人心理状态的能力，其潜在机制和神经解剖学关联在很大程度上仍不为人所知。虽然众多研究表明腹内侧（VM）额叶在心理理论中发挥作用，但最近的研究结果对前额叶皮质的作用提出了质疑。我们设计了两项新颖的任务，以检验以下假设：情感心理理论加工与认知心理理论加工不同，且部分依赖于不同的解剖学基础。将VM局部病变患者的表现与背外侧病变患者、混合前额叶病变患者、后部病变患者以及健康对照者的反应进行比较。在两项任务中，与认知心理理论条件相比，对照组在情感心理理论条件下的错误更少，但VM损伤患者呈现出不同的趋势。此外，虽然情感心理理论主要因VM损伤而受损，但认知心理理论主要因广泛的前额叶损伤而受损，这表明认知和情感心理化能力部分可分离。通过将“情感心理理论”概念引入社会认知研究，这些结果为VM在社会行为情感方面的中介作用提供了新的见解，而这些情感方面可能是这些患者所观察到的行为障碍的基础。
