Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2020 Jul 23;9:e56477. doi: 10.7554/eLife.56477.
A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind - what we think or believe - from public actions - what we say or do. This ability is central to successful social interaction - with different social contexts often requiring different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict and facilitate communication. Here we investigated how the human brain supports private-public mappings, using an interactive task which required subjects to adapt how they communicated their confidence about a perceptual decision to the social context. Univariate and multivariate analysis of fMRI data revealed that a private-public distinction is reflected in a medial-lateral division of prefrontal cortex - with lateral frontal pole (FPl) supporting the context-dependent mapping from a private sense of confidence to a public report. The concept of private-public mappings provides a promising framework for understanding flexible social behaviour.
人类认知的一个核心特征是能够将内心的想法或信念（私人状态）与我们所说或所做的公共行为（公共状态）区分开来。这种能力是成功社交互动的关键——不同的社会背景通常需要在私人状态和公共行为之间建立不同的映射关系，以减少冲突并促进沟通。在这里，我们使用一项需要被试根据社会情境调整他们对感知决策的信心表达的交互任务，来研究大脑如何支持私人-公共映射。对 fMRI 数据的单变量和多变量分析表明，私人-公共的区别反映在前额叶皮层的内侧-外侧分区中——外侧额极（FPl）支持从私人信心感映射到公共报告的语境依赖性。私人-公共映射的概念为理解灵活的社会行为提供了一个很有前途的框架。
