CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Mar 21;33(7):3773-3786. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac306.
Humans often need to deal with various forms of information conflicts that arise when they receive inconsistent information. However, it remains unclear how we resolve them and whether the brain may recruit similar or distinct brain mechanisms to process different domains (e.g. social vs. nonsocial) of conflicts. To address this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and scanned 50 healthy participants when they were asked to perform 2 Stroop tasks with different forms of conflicts: social (i.e. face-gender incongruency) and nonsocial (i.e. color-word incongruency) conflicts. Neuroimaging results revealed that the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex was generally activated in processing incongruent versus congruent stimuli regardless of the task type, serving as a common mechanism for conflict resolving across domains. Notably, trial-based and model-based results jointly demonstrated that the dorsal and rostral medial prefrontal cortices were uniquely engaged in processing social incongruent stimuli, suggesting distinct neural substrates of social conflict resolving and adaptation. The findings uncover that the common but unique brain mechanisms are recruited when humans resolve and adapt to social conflicts.
人类在接收到不一致的信息时，经常需要处理各种形式的信息冲突。然而，目前尚不清楚我们如何解决这些冲突，以及大脑是否可能招募相似或不同的大脑机制来处理不同领域（例如社会与非社会）的冲突。为了解决这个问题，我们使用功能磁共振成像技术，扫描了 50 名健康参与者，当他们被要求执行两种不同形式的 Stroop 任务时：社会（即面孔-性别不一致）和非社会（即颜色-词语不一致）冲突。神经影像学结果表明，腹外侧前额叶皮层在处理不一致与一致刺激时通常会被激活，无论任务类型如何，这都为跨领域解决冲突提供了一个共同的机制。值得注意的是，基于试次和基于模型的结果共同表明，背侧和额内侧前额叶皮层专门参与处理社会不一致刺激，表明社会冲突解决和适应的神经基础是不同的。这些发现揭示了人类在解决和适应社会冲突时所招募的共同但又独特的大脑机制。
