Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Taipa, China.
School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2023 Jun 1;44(8):3343-3358. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26285. Epub 2023 Apr 13.
Mentalising ability, indexed as the ability to understand others' beliefs, feelings, intentions, thoughts and traits, is a pivotal and fundamental component of human social cognition. However, considering the multifaceted nature of mentalising ability, little research has focused on characterising individual differences in different mentalising components. And even less research has been devoted to investigating how the variance in the structural and functional patterns of the amygdala and hippocampus, two vital subcortical regions of the "social brain", are related to inter-individual variability in mentalising ability. Here, as a first step toward filling these gaps, we exploited inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) to assess relationships between amygdala and hippocampal morphometry (surface-based multivariate morphometry statistics, MMS), connectivity (resting-state functional connectivity, rs-FC) and mentalising ability (interactive mentalisation questionnaire [IMQ] scores) across the participants ( ). In IS-RSA, we proposed a novel pipeline, that is, computing patching and pooling operations-based surface distance (CPP-SD), to obtain a decent representation for high-dimensional MMS data. On this basis, we found significant correlations (i.e., second-order isomorphisms) between these three distinct modalities, indicating that a trinity existed in idiosyncratic patterns of brain morphometry, connectivity and mentalising ability. Notably, a region-related mentalising specificity emerged from these associations: self-self and self-other mentalisation are more related to the hippocampus, while other-self mentalisation shows a closer link with the amygdala. Furthermore, by utilising the dyadic regression analysis, we observed significant interactions such that subject pairs with similar morphometry had even greater mentalising similarity if they were also similar in rs-FC. Altogether, we demonstrated the feasibility and illustrated the promise of using IS-RSA to study individual differences, deepening our understanding of how individual brains give rise to their mentalising abilities.
心理化能力，即理解他人的信仰、感受、意图、想法和特征的能力，是人类社会认知的关键和基本组成部分。然而，考虑到心理化能力的多面性，很少有研究集中在描述不同心理化成分的个体差异上。甚至更少的研究致力于调查杏仁核和海马体这两个“社会大脑”的重要皮质下区域的结构和功能模式的方差如何与心理化能力的个体间变异性相关。在这里，作为填补这些空白的第一步，我们利用了主体间代表性相似性分析（IS-RSA）来评估参与者之间的杏仁核和海马体形态（基于表面的多元形态测量统计，MMS）、连接（静息状态功能连接，rs-FC）和心理化能力（交互心理化问卷[IMQ]分数）之间的关系。在 IS-RSA 中，我们提出了一种新的流水线，即计算基于补丁和池操作的表面距离（CPP-SD），以获得高维 MMS 数据的良好表示。在此基础上，我们发现这三种不同模态之间存在显著的相关性（即二阶同构），表明在个体的大脑形态、连接和心理化能力模式中存在三位一体。值得注意的是，从这些关联中出现了与区域相关的心理化特异性：自我-自我和自我-他人心理化与海马体更为相关，而他人-他人心理化与杏仁核更为相关。此外，通过利用对偶回归分析，我们观察到了显著的相互作用，即如果具有相似形态的主体对之间在 rs-FC 上也相似，则它们的心理化相似性更高。总之，我们证明了使用 IS-RSA 研究个体差异的可行性，并说明了其潜力，加深了我们对个体大脑如何产生心理化能力的理解。
