Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Jun 9;117(23):13162-13167. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2003110117. Epub 2020 May 26.
Keeping track of other people's gaze is an essential task in social cognition and key for successfully reading other people's intentions and beliefs (theory of mind). Recent behavioral evidence suggests that we construct an implicit model of other people's gaze, which may incorporate physically incoherent attributes such as a construct of force-carrying beams that emanate from the eyes. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivoxel pattern analysis to test the prediction that the brain encodes gaze as implied motion streaming from an agent toward a gazed-upon object. We found that a classifier, trained to discriminate the direction of visual motion, significantly decoded the gaze direction in static images depicting a sighted face, but not a blindfolded one, from brain activity patterns in the human motion-sensitive middle temporal complex (MT+) and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Our results demonstrate a link between the visual motion system and social brain mechanisms, in which the TPJ, a key node in theory of mind, works in concert with MT+ to encode gaze as implied motion. This model may be a fundamental aspect of social cognition that allows us to efficiently connect agents with the objects of their attention. It is as if the brain draws a quick visual sketch with moving arrows to help keep track of who is attending to what. This implicit, fluid-flow model of other people's gaze may help explain culturally universal myths about the mind as an energy-like, flowing essence.
跟踪他人的目光是社会认知中的一项基本任务，也是成功解读他人意图和信念（心理理论）的关键。最近的行为证据表明，我们构建了他人目光的隐含模型，其中可能包含物理上不连贯的属性，例如从眼睛发出的力载体束的构建。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像和多体素模式分析来检验这样一个预测，即大脑将目光编码为从主体流向被注视物体的隐含运动。我们发现，一个经过训练以辨别视觉运动方向的分类器，可以从人类运动敏感的中颞复合体（MT+）和颞顶联合区（TPJ）的大脑活动模式中，显著解码描绘注视面孔的静态图像中的注视方向，但不能解码蒙住眼睛的面孔。我们的结果表明，视觉运动系统与社会大脑机制之间存在联系，其中心理理论的关键节点 TPJ 与 MT+ 协同工作，将目光编码为隐含运动。这种模型可能是社会认知的一个基本方面，使我们能够有效地将主体与他们关注的对象联系起来。就好像大脑用移动的箭头快速绘制了一个视觉草图，以帮助跟踪谁在关注什么。这种他人目光的隐含、流畅的流动模型可能有助于解释关于心灵作为一种能量流本质的文化上普遍存在的神话。
