Department of Psychology, University of California-Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Jan 1;24(1):80-6. doi: 10.1177/0956797612450884. Epub 2012 Dec 6.
Much social-cognitive processing is believed to occur automatically; however, the relative automaticity of the brain systems underlying social cognition remains largely undetermined. We used functional MRI to test for automaticity in the functioning of two brain systems that research has indicated are important for understanding other people's behavior: the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system. Participants remembered either easy phone numbers (low cognitive load) or difficult phone numbers (high cognitive load) while observing actions after adopting one of four comprehension goals. For all four goals, mirror neuron system activation showed relatively little evidence of modulation by load; in contrast, the association of mentalizing system activation with the goal of inferring the actor's mental state was extinguished by increased cognitive load. These results support a dual-process model of the brain systems underlying action understanding and social cognition; the mirror neuron system supports automatic behavior identification, and the mentalizing system supports controlled social causal attribution.
许多社会认知加工被认为是自动发生的；然而，支持社会认知的大脑系统的相对自动性在很大程度上仍未确定。我们使用功能磁共振成像来测试两个大脑系统的自动功能，研究表明这两个系统对于理解他人的行为很重要：镜像神经元系统和心理化系统。参与者在采用四个理解目标中的一个来观察动作时，记住了容易的电话号码（低认知负荷）或困难的电话号码（高认知负荷）。对于所有四个目标，镜像神经元系统的激活几乎没有证据表明受到负荷的调节；相比之下，心理化系统的激活与推断行为者心理状态的目标之间的关联被增加的认知负荷所消除。这些结果支持了一个关于支持行为理解和社会认知的大脑系统的双重加工模型；镜像神经元系统支持自动行为识别，心理化系统支持受控的社会因果归因。
