Title: Mindreading mindreading: Using multivariate pattern analysis to decode the neural basis of mental state ascription.
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Mindreading (also known as mentalising, or Theory of Mind) is the ability to think about what others see, know, think, want and intend, and is thought to be a fundamental basis of social interaction and communication. Mindreading has been widely studied in young children and infants, is known to be impaired in people with autism and schizophrenia, and more recently its cognitive and neural basis has begun to be studied in adults. Research using brain imaging, and examining the effects of brain injury and brain stimulation, converges on the view that some brain regions are distinctively involved in mindreading compared with similar tasks that do not involve understanding other minds, leading to suggestions that they comprise a "social" or "mindreading brain network". It is typically assumed that these brain regions represent mindreading information. However, a recent alternative suggestion is that mindreading information is represented elsewhere, perhaps in "semantic" brain regions, and that the mindreading brain network merely controls access to this information. Testing between these views is critical for our understanding of how the brain supports mindreading, and has implications for long-debated theoretical accounts about how we mindread. The fundamental unit of mindreading is a representation that relates a particular AGENT (e.g., Mariam) to a particular CONTENT (e.g., ...thinks there's a rabbit in the box). We will ask participants to hold such information briefly in mind using tasks that present pictures of people and simple scenarios that depict what they are thinking. Thus, participants will be led to hold in mind something like "Mariam thinks there's a rabbit in the box, but I know there's really a bell", with the particular AGENT and the particular CONTENTS varying from trial to trial. If "mindreading brain regions" are centrally involved in representing such information, then it should be possible to decode the AGENT who is thinking (Mariam in this case), and the CONTENT they are thinking about (Rabbit) from patterns of brain activity in these areas. However, if "mindreading brain regions" actually only direct attention to information represented "semantic" brain regions then, it should be possible to decode AGENT and CONTENT information from activity in "semantic" brain areas, but not "mindreading" areas. The work is made possible by recent developments in tasks for assessing mindreading and analytic techniques for decoding information from fine-grained patterns of human brain activity. Our tasks present mindreading problems for a large number of trials over which AGENT and CONTENT are systematically varied. Three experiments will focus on CONTENT (Experiment 1), AGENT+CONTENT (Experiment 2), and the co-ordination of CONTENT information over time (Experiment 3). Experiments 1 and 2 will employ fMRI, which gives excellent spatial resolution, while Experiment 3 will use EEG, which gives excellent temporal resolution. All three experiments will employ advanced techniques for multivariate analysis of brain activity data to examine whether we can indeed decode information about who is thinking what from "mindreading" or "semantic" brain regions. Our studies will show whether regions of the social brain actually encode information necessary for mindreading, and determine the order in which such information is activated. These results will have implications for how the brain supports mindreading, and how mindreading may be disrupted through brain injury, or atypical brain function in disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.


Research activity codes: 1.1 NORMAL BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONING;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: NEUROLOGICAL;MENTAL HEALTH