Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The neural correlates of passively viewed sequences of true and false beliefs
AU - Geangu, Elena
AU - Gibson, Aimee
AU - Kaduk, Katharina
AU - Reid, Vincent M.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - The ability to infer other people's mental states such as desires, emotions, intentions and beliefs is essential for successful social interactions, and it is usually referred to as theory of mind (ToM). In particular, the ability to detect and understand that people have beliefs about reality that may be false is considered an important hallmark of ToM. This experiment reports on the results of 18 participants who viewed photographic sequences of an actress performing actions as a consequence of true and false beliefs. Consistent with prior work, results from the passive viewing of stimuli depicting true belief indicated an increased response over frontal, central and parietal regions when compared with the amplitude for the false belief condition. These results show that (i) frontal activity is required for processing false belief tasks and (ii) parietal effects reported in previous studies to reflect specific cognitive process of monitoring others' beliefs can be elicited in the absence of an explicit instruction for mentalizing.
AB - The ability to infer other people's mental states such as desires, emotions, intentions and beliefs is essential for successful social interactions, and it is usually referred to as theory of mind (ToM). In particular, the ability to detect and understand that people have beliefs about reality that may be false is considered an important hallmark of ToM. This experiment reports on the results of 18 participants who viewed photographic sequences of an actress performing actions as a consequence of true and false beliefs. Consistent with prior work, results from the passive viewing of stimuli depicting true belief indicated an increased response over frontal, central and parietal regions when compared with the amplitude for the false belief condition. These results show that (i) frontal activity is required for processing false belief tasks and (ii) parietal effects reported in previous studies to reflect specific cognitive process of monitoring others' beliefs can be elicited in the absence of an explicit instruction for mentalizing.
KW - ERP
KW - false belief
KW - passive paradigms
KW - frontal activity
KW - parietal activity
KW - social cognition
U2 - 10.1093/scan/nss015
DO - 10.1093/scan/nss015
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 22317745
VL - 8
SP - 432
EP - 437
JO - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
JF - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
SN - 1749-5016
IS - 4
ER -