Cacioppo Stephanie, Juan Elsa, Monteleone George
Pritzker School of Medicine, Biological Science Division, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of ChicagoChicago, IL, United States.
High-Performance Electrical NeuroImaging Laboratory, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, CCSN, University of ChicagoChicago, IL, United States.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2017 Aug 25;11:155. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00155. eCollection 2017.
Inferring intentions of others is one of the most intriguing issues in interpersonal interaction. Theories of embodied cognition and simulation suggest that this mechanism takes place through a direct and automatic matching process that occurs between an observed action and past actions. This process occurs via the reactivation of past self-related sensorimotor experiences within the inferior frontoparietal network (including the mirror neuron system, MNS). The working model is that the anticipatory representations of others' behaviors require internal predictive models of actions formed from pre-established, shared representations between the observer and the actor. This model suggests that observers should be better at predicting intentions performed by a familiar actor, rather than a stranger. However, little is known about the modulations of the intention brain network as a function of the familiarity between the observer and the actor. Here, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a behavioral intention inference task, in which participants were asked to predict intentions from three types of actors: A familiar actor (their significant other), themselves (another familiar actor), and a non-familiar actor (a stranger). Our results showed that the participants were better at inferring intentions performed by familiar actors than non-familiar actors and that this better performance was associated with greater activation within and beyond the inferior frontoparietal network i.e., in brain areas related to familiarity (e.g., precuneus). In addition, and in line with Hebbian principles of neural modulations, the more the participants reported being cognitively close to their partner, the less the brain areas associated with action self-other comparison (e.g., inferior parietal lobule), attention (e.g., superior parietal lobule), recollection (hippocampus), and pair bond (ventral tegmental area, VTA) were recruited, suggesting that the more a shared mental representation has been pre-established, the more neurons show suppression in their response to the presentation of information to which they are sensitive. These results suggest that the relation of performance to the extent of neural activation during intention understanding may display differential relationships based on the cognitive domain, brain region, and the cognitive interdependence between the observer and the actor.
推断他人意图是人际互动中最引人入胜的问题之一。具身认知和模拟理论表明，这种机制是通过观察到的动作与过去动作之间直接且自动的匹配过程发生的。这个过程通过额顶叶下部网络（包括镜像神经元系统，MNS）内过去与自我相关的感觉运动体验的重新激活而发生。其工作模型是，对他人行为的预期表征需要由观察者和行动者之间预先建立的共享表征形成的行动内部预测模型。该模型表明，观察者应该更擅长预测熟悉的行动者而非陌生人执行的意图。然而，关于意图脑网络作为观察者与行动者之间熟悉程度的函数的调制情况，我们所知甚少。在这里，我们将功能磁共振成像（fMRI）与行为意图推理任务相结合，在该任务中，参与者被要求从三种类型的行动者中预测意图：熟悉的行动者（他们的重要他人）、自己（另一个熟悉的行动者）和不熟悉的行动者（陌生人）。我们的结果表明，参与者在推断熟悉行动者执行的意图方面比不熟悉的行动者表现更好，并且这种更好的表现与额顶叶下部网络内外更大的激活相关，即在与熟悉程度相关的脑区（如楔前叶）。此外，与神经调制的赫布原理一致，参与者报告在认知上与他们的伴侣越亲近，与行动自我 - 他人比较相关的脑区（如顶下小叶）、注意力相关脑区（如顶上小叶）、回忆相关脑区（海马体）和伴侣关系相关脑区（腹侧被盖区，VTA）的激活就越少，这表明预先建立的共享心理表征越多，神经元对其敏感信息呈现的反应就越受到抑制。这些结果表明，在意图理解过程中，表现与神经激活程度之间的关系可能基于认知领域、脑区以及观察者与行动者之间的认知相互依存关系而呈现出不同的关系。
