Lewis Penelope A, Birch Amy, Hall Alexander, Dunbar Robin I M
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Division of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jul 1;12(7):1063-1071. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx034.
A central assumption that underpins much of the discussion of the role played by social cognition in brain evolution is that social cognition is unusually cognitively demanding. This assumption has never been tested. Here, we use a task in which participants read stories and then answered questions about the stories in a behavioural experiment (39 participants) and an fMRI experiment (17 participants) to show that mentalising requires more time for responses than factual memory of a matched complexity and also that higher orders of mentalising are disproportionately more demanding and require the recruitment of more neurons in brain regions known to be associated with theory of mind, including insula, posterior STS, temporal pole and cerebellum. These results have significant implications both for models of brain function and for models of brain evolution.
社会认知在大脑进化中所起作用的诸多讨论背后的一个核心假设是，社会认知在认知上的要求极高。这一假设从未得到过验证。在此，我们采用一项任务，让参与者阅读故事，然后在行为实验（39名参与者）和功能磁共振成像实验（17名参与者）中回答有关这些故事的问题，结果表明，与匹配复杂度的事实性记忆相比，心理化需要更多时间来做出反应，而且更高层次的心理化要求不成比例地更高，并且需要在已知与心理理论相关的脑区，包括脑岛、颞上沟后部、颞极和小脑中募集更多神经元。这些结果对大脑功能模型和大脑进化模型都具有重大意义。
