Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Department of Psychology, Bangor University, Gwynedd, Wales, UK; Department of Psychology, Aberystwyth University, Ceredigion, Wales, UK.
Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Department of Psychology, Bangor University, Gwynedd, Wales, UK; Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Neuropsychologia. 2024 Jul 29;200:108904. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108904. Epub 2024 May 16.
Key unanswered questions for cognitive neuroscience include whether social cognition is underpinned by specialised brain regions and to what extent it simultaneously depends on more domain-general systems. Until we glean a better understanding of the full set of contributions made by various systems, theories of social cognition will remain fundamentally limited. In the present study, we evaluate a recent proposal that semantic cognition plays a crucial role in supporting social cognition. While previous brain-based investigations have focused on dissociating these two systems, our primary aim was to assess the degree to which the neural correlates are overlapping, particularly within two key regions, the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). We focus on activation associated with theory of mind (ToM) and adopt a meta-analytic activation likelihood approach to synthesise a large set of functional neuroimaging studies and compare their results with studies of semantic cognition. As a key consideration, we sought to account for methodological differences across the two sets of studies, including the fact that ToM studies tend to use nonverbal stimuli while the semantics literature is dominated by language-based tasks. Overall, we observed consistent overlap between the two sets of brain regions, especially in the ATL and TPJ. This supports the claim that tasks involving ToM draw upon more general semantic retrieval processes. We also identified activation specific to ToM in the right TPJ, bilateral anterior mPFC, and right precuneus. This is consistent with the view that, nested amongst more domain-general systems, there is specialised circuitry that is tuned to social processes.
认知神经科学中仍有一些悬而未决的问题，例如社会认知是否由特定的大脑区域支持，以及它在多大程度上同时依赖于更具领域一般性的系统。在我们深入了解各种系统所做出的全部贡献之前，社会认知理论将仍然存在根本性的局限性。在本研究中，我们评估了最近提出的一个观点，即语义认知在支持社会认知方面起着关键作用。虽然之前的基于大脑的研究集中于将这两个系统分开，但我们的主要目的是评估神经相关性的重叠程度，特别是在前颞叶（ATL）和颞顶联合区（TPJ）这两个关键区域内。我们专注于与心理理论（ToM）相关的激活，并采用元分析激活可能性方法来综合大量功能神经影像学研究，并将其结果与语义认知研究进行比较。作为一个关键考虑因素，我们试图解释这两组研究之间的方法学差异，包括这样一个事实，即 ToM 研究倾向于使用非语言刺激，而语义文献则以基于语言的任务为主。总的来说，我们观察到这两组大脑区域之间存在一致的重叠，尤其是在 ATL 和 TPJ 中。这支持了这样一种观点，即涉及 ToM 的任务依赖于更一般的语义检索过程。我们还在右侧 TPJ、双侧前扣带回和右侧楔前叶中发现了特定于 ToM 的激活。这与嵌套在更具领域一般性的系统中的观点一致，即存在专门针对社会过程的电路。
