The Link between Social Cognition and Self-referential Thought in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

By Jason P. Mitchell, Mahzarin R. Banaji, C. N. Macrae. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2005

811 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in seemingly disparate cognitive functions, such as understanding the minds of other people and processing information about the self. This functional overlap would be expected if humans use their own experiences to infer the mental states of others, a basic postulate of simulation theory. Neural activity was measured while participants attended to either the mental or physical aspects of a series of other people. To permit a test of simulation theory's prediction that inferences based on self-reflection should only be made for similar others, targets were subsequently rated for their degree of similarity to self. Parametric analyses revealed a region of the ventral mPFCpreviously implicated in self-referencing tasksin which activity correlated with perceived self/other similarity, but only for mentalizing trials. These results suggest that self-reflection may be used to infer the mental states of others when they are sufficiently similar to self.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ddf907f1738295993d3fdb6fd2878b872541a048

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Citations in the corpus

The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-analysis (2009, methodology): “( 2005 ) Form impression based on behavior Remember sequence of information fMRI 18 13 Ohnishi et al.”
Temporo-parietal Junction Activity in Theory-of-Mind Tasks: Falseness, Beliefs, or Attention (2009, result): “Although none of the studies that contrasted FB with PH reported any activation differences in this or a nearby area, other ToM imaging studies do report activity comparing pretend versus real actions (German, Niehaus, Roarty, Giesbrecht, & Miller, 2004 ), mentalizing versus nonmentalizing (Mitchel”
Patterns of Brain Activity Supporting Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, and Theory of Mind, and Their Relationship to the Default Mode Network (2010, background): “Self- and other-attribution judgments have been associated with medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activity (Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005 ; Gusnard, Akbudak, Shulman, & Raichle, 2001 ), a reliable node of the DMN.”
The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. (2012, background): “Second, we found a non-linear relationship between age and reappraisal ability, which was accompanied by activation in regions associated with mental state attribution (Frith and Frith, 1999; Mitchell et al., 2005; Olsson and Ochsner, 2008).”
Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition (2006, methodology): “This possibility has been investigated explicitly by Mitchell et al”
Empathy: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach (2009, background): “Similarly, medial prefrontal cortex is preferentially engaged when participants judge psychological characteristics of a target, regardless of whether the target is a person or a dog ( Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005 ).”
A Meta-analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Self- and Other Judgments Reveals a Spatial Gradient for Mentalizing in Medial Prefrontal Cortex (2012, neutral): “These contrasts were drawn from 33 studies for self and 34 studies for other.”
Overlapping activity in anterior insula during interoception and emotional experience (2012, neutral): “This comparison is analogous to those made in many previous studies, in which explicit monitoring and judgment of one's own emotions or mental states is compared to lower level judgments made about similar stimuli (Mitchell et al., 2005; Ochsner et al., 2004; Winston et al., 2003).”
Social cognitive neuroscience: a review of core processes. (2007, background): “…judge the psychological traits and states of their mother (Ruby & Decety 2004), close friend (Ochsner et al. 2005), or someone rated as similar to themselves (Mitchell et al. 2005), significant activations are produced in MPFC, the region most typically found in self-reflective processes.”
I Know You Are But What Am I?!: Neural Bases of Self- and Social Knowledge Retrieval in Children and Adults (2007, background): “…that the DMPFC, which has been associated with thinking about other individuals' mental states—particularly those who are not seen as similar to oneself (Mitchell et al., 2005, 2006; Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2004)—was predictably more active in adults during social than self-knowledge retrieval.”
Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process (2012, background): “For example, it is activated during evaluation of self and others' emotional reactions (Fossati et al., 2003; Ochsner et al., 2004; Ruby and Decety, 2004) and emotional mental state attribution (Mitchell et al., 2005).”
Two systems for empathy: a double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions. (2009, background): “…are working autonomously, every empathic response will evoke both components to some extent, depending on various variables such as the social context, the level of distress (Jackson et al., 2005) and the perceived similarity between the individual and the protagonist (Mitchell et al., 2005).”
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “…have identified similarities in neural activity for self-and other-judgments (Decety & Sommerville, 2003; C. D. Frith & Frith, 1999; Jenkins et al., 2008; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2006) albeit with a focus on personal-level judgments about beliefs, attitudes or personality characteristics.”
Neural Correlates of Positive and Negative Emotion Regulation (2007, background): “…of internally generated information (Kelly, Macrae, Wyland, Inati, & Heatherton, 2002; Craik et al., 1999), and perceived similarity between self and others (Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005), was uniquely activated while increasing positive emotion but not for any other types of regulation.”
Improving Acute Stress Responses (2013, background): “For example, areas of the medial prefrontal cortex allow individuals to consider what reappraisal instructions mean to them (Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005).”
The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: review of literature and implications for future research. (2006, background): “This literature is summarized elsewhere and is not in the scope of the present article (Baron-Cohen et al., 2000; Mitchell et al., 2005; Decety and Jackson, 2004; Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990; Eisenberg, 2000).”