Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2013 Sep;25(9):1406-17. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00403. Epub 2013 Apr 11.
An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., "scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature"). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition--medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the "mind" of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.
个体具有心智；群体则没有。然而，人类经常将无法还原为其任何成员的心智状态赋予群体（例如，“科学家希望了解自然界的方方面面”）。但是，这些心智状态与我们归因于个体的心智状态在类别上是否相似？在两项 fMRI 实验中，我们针对一组与社会认知相关的大脑区域检验了这个问题，这些区域包括内侧前额叶皮层、前颞叶、TPJ 和内侧顶叶皮层。参与者交替回答关于个体和群体的心智状态和物理属性的问题。以前与个体心理化相关的区域对群体的判断也有强烈的反应，这表明在思考个体的心智和群体的“心智”时，感知者会运用相同的社会认知过程。然而，多变量搜索光分析显示，这些区域中的几个区域对群体和个体的反应存在明显的多体素模式，这表明在进行心理状态推断时，感知者会保持群体和个体的不同表示。这些发现表明，感知者以与个体心理化类似的方式对群体进行心理化，但大脑在这些实体的表示之间仍保持着重要的区别。
