The posterior superior temporal sulcus is sensitive to the outcome of human and non-human goal-directed actions.

By Sarah Shultz, Su Mei Lee, Kevin A. Pelphrey, Gregory McCarthy. 2011

47 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prior studies have demonstrated that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is involved in analyzing the intentions underlying actions and is sensitive to the context within which actions occur. However, it is debated whether the pSTS is actually sensitive to goals underlying actions, or whether previous studies can be interpreted to suggest that the pSTS is instead involved in the allocation of visual attention towards unexpected events. In addition, little is known about whether the pSTS is specialized for reasoning about the actions of social agents or whether the pSTS is sensitive to the actions of both animate and inanimate entities. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated activation in response to passive viewing of successful and unsuccessful animate and inanimate goal-directed actions. Activation in the right pSTS was stronger in response to failed actions compared to successful actions, suggesting that the pSTS plays a role in encoding the goals underlying actions. Activation in the pSTS did not differentiate between animate and inanimate actions, suggesting that the pSTS is sensitive to the goal-directed actions of both animate and inanimate entities.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “The STS also responds more to failed actions (e.g., failing to drop a ring onto a peg), an extreme form of inefficiency, than to successful ones (getting the ring onto the peg, Shultz et al., 2011).”