Inconsistencies in spontaneous and intentional trait inferences.
By Ning Ma, Marie Vandekerckhove, Kris Baetens, F. Van Overwalle, Ruth Seurinck, Wim Fias. 2012
92 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study explores the fMRI correlates of observers making trait inferences about other people under conflicting social cues. Participants were presented with several behavioral descriptions involving an agent that implied a particular trait. The last behavior was either consistent or inconsistent with the previously implied trait. This was done under instructions that elicited either spontaneous trait inferences ('read carefully') or intentional trait inferences ('infer a trait'). The results revealed that when the behavioral descriptions violated earlier trait implications, regardless of instruction, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was more strongly recruited as well as the domain-general conflict network including the posterior medial frontal cortex (pmFC) and the right prefrontal cortex (rPFC). These latter two areas were more strongly activated under intentional than spontaneous instructions. These findings suggest that when trait-relevant behavioral information is inconsistent, not only is activity increased in the mentalizing network responsible for trait processing, but control is also passed to a higher level conflict monitoring network in order to detect and resolve the contradiction.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Peter Mende-Siedlecki
- Alexander Todorov
- Yang Cai
- Christopher Y. Olivola
- Ron Dotsch
- Nikolaas N. Oosterhof
- M. Petersen
- Lasse Laustsen
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, neutral): “, “Tolvan gave her sister a slap”) compared to when they are predictable (e.g., “Tolvan gave her sister a hug”;Ma et al., 2012; Mende-Siedlecki et al., 2012).”
- The neural dynamics of updating person impressions. (2013, background): “…to the last two trials, across both types of targets (B). by guest on M ay 23, 2016 http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Previous work has observed additional inconsistency-related activity in a more posterior region of mPFC (referred to as domain-general pmFC; Ma et al., 2011).”