Sevinc Gunes, Gurvit Hakan, Spreng R Nathan
Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, Department of Human Development, Human Neuroscience Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jul 1;12(7):1118-1127. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx035.
Moral cognition is associated with activation of the default network, regions implicated in mentalizing about one's own actions or the intentions of others. Yet little is known about the initial detection of moral information. We examined the neural correlates of moral processing during a narrative completion task, which included an implicit moral salience manipulation. During fMRI scanning, participants read a brief vignette and selected the most semantically congruent sentence from two options to complete the narrative. The options were immoral, moral or neutral statements. RT was fastest for the selection of neutral statements and slowest for immoral statements. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that responses involving morally laden content engaged default and executive control network brain regions including medial and rostral prefrontal cortex, and core regions of the salience network, including anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate. Immoral vs moral conditions additionally engaged the salience network. These results implicate the salience network in the detection of moral information, which may modulate downstream default and frontal control network interactions in the service of complex moral reasoning and decision-making processes. These findings suggest that moral cognition involves both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes, mediated by discrete large-scale brain networks and their interactions.
道德认知与默认网络的激活相关，这些区域与对自身行为或他人意图的心理化有关。然而，对于道德信息的初始检测却知之甚少。我们在一个叙事完成任务中研究了道德加工的神经关联，该任务包括一个隐性道德显著性操纵。在功能磁共振成像扫描期间，参与者阅读一个简短的小故事，并从两个选项中选择语义上最相符的句子来完成叙事。选项包括不道德、道德或中性陈述。选择中性陈述的反应时间最快，选择不道德陈述的反应时间最慢。神经影像学分析表明，涉及道德负载内容的反应激活了默认网络和执行控制网络的脑区，包括内侧和喙部前额叶皮层，以及显著性网络的核心区域，包括前脑岛和背侧前扣带回。不道德与道德条件相比还激活了显著性网络。这些结果表明显著性网络参与了道德信息的检测，这可能会调节下游默认网络和额叶控制网络的相互作用，以服务于复杂的道德推理和决策过程。这些发现表明，道德认知涉及自下而上和自上而下的注意过程，由离散的大规模脑网络及其相互作用介导。
