Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK.
Soc Neurosci. 2012 Jul;7(4):424-35. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2011.638799. Epub 2011 Nov 25.
The ability to attribute mental states to others and understand the basis of their decisions is essential for human social interaction. A controversial theory states that this is achieved by simulating another's information processing in one's own neural circuits. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is known to play an important role in the registration of discrepancies between the predicted and actual outcomes of decisions (prediction errors).When positive and negative feedback fails altogether, the failure may also signal errors in the prediction that the outcome of that decision would be informative and guide future decisions. Does the ACC signal that an outcome is unexpectedly uninformative? When an outcome directed to others is uninformative, do we understand their mental states by simulating them in the circuits of the ACC in our own brain? The aim of our study was to test for these two possibilities in the human brain with event-related fMRI. We tested whether the ACC processes errors in the prediction of informative feedback and whether the ACC is also activated when scanned subjects process the same outcomes of another's decisions. We show that each is processed by a separate subregion of the ACC.
将心理状态归因于他人并理解其决策基础对于人类社会互动至关重要。一种有争议的理论认为，这是通过在自身神经回路中模拟他人的信息处理来实现的。已知前扣带皮层 (ACC) 在记录决策的预期和实际结果之间的差异（预测误差）方面起着重要作用。当积极和消极反馈完全失败时，失败也可能表明对该决策结果将具有信息性并指导未来决策的预测错误。ACC 是否会发出结果出乎意料地没有信息量的信号？当针对他人的结果没有信息量时，我们是否通过在自己大脑的 ACC 电路中模拟它们来理解他们的心理状态？我们研究的目的是用人脑事件相关 fMRI 来检验这两种可能性。我们测试了 ACC 是否处理了有关信息量反馈的预测错误，以及当扫描对象处理另一个人的决策的相同结果时，ACC 是否也被激活。我们表明，ACC 的每个分区都处理了不同的错误。
