School of Psychology, Bangor University, UK.
School of Psychology, Bangor University, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Apr;112:31-39. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.02.023. Epub 2018 Feb 22.
Success in the social world requires the ability to perceive not just individuals and their actions, but pairs of people and the interactions between them. Despite the complexity of social interactions, humans are adept at interpreting those interactions they observe. Although the brain basis of this remarkable ability has remained relatively unexplored, converging functional MRI evidence suggests the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is centrally involved. Here, we sought to determine whether this region is sensitive to both the presence of interactive information, as well as to the content of qualitatively different interactions (i.e. competition vs. cooperation). Using point-light human figure stimuli, we demonstrate that the right pSTS is maximally activated when contrasting dyadic interactions vs. dyads performing independent, non-interactive actions. We then used this task to localize the same pSTS region in an independent participant group, and tested responses to non-human moving shape stimuli (i.e. two circles' movements conveying either interactive or non-interactive behaviour). We observed significant support vector machine classification for both the presence and type of interaction (i.e. interaction vs. non-interaction, and competition vs. cooperation, respectively) in the pSTS, as well as neighbouring temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). These findings demonstrate the important role that these regions play in perceiving and understanding social interactions, and lay the foundations for further research to fully characterize interaction responses in these areas.
在社交世界中取得成功需要能够感知个体及其行为，还需要感知人与人之间的关系以及他们之间的互动。尽管社交互动非常复杂，但人类善于解读他们所观察到的互动。尽管大脑对这种非凡能力的基础仍然知之甚少，但越来越多的功能磁共振成像证据表明，后上颞区（pSTS）在其中起着核心作用。在这里，我们试图确定该区域是否对交互信息的存在以及不同性质的交互内容（即竞争与合作）敏感。使用点光人体图形刺激，我们证明当对比二对二互动与二对二执行独立的、非交互动作时，右 pSTS 被最大程度地激活。然后，我们使用此任务在独立参与者组中定位相同的 pSTS 区域，并测试了对非人类移动形状刺激的反应（即两个圆形运动传达交互或非交互行为）。我们在 pSTS 以及相邻的颞顶交界处（TPJ）中观察到了对交互存在和类型（即交互与非交互，竞争与合作）的支持向量机分类，这表明这些区域在感知和理解社交互动中起着重要作用，并为进一步研究这些区域的交互反应奠定了基础。
