The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 34 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Functional neuroimaging of theory of mind
Abstract
The last decade of neuroimaging has discovered a robust functional regularity in the human brain: regions that have increased activity when participants think about other minds. This chapter first reviews the literature that supports this generalization and offers one interpretation: that there are cortical regions with the specific cognitive function of representing people’s mental states and experiences. We argue that this hypothesis does not rely on a strong, “phrenological” understanding of functional regions, but that understanding other minds is a major organizing principle of responses over cortex. Nevertheless, pushing beyond a relatively underspecified description of these brain regions and their functions requires characterizing not just the location and gross selectivity of these brain regions, but their precise computational roles. Thus, the final portion of the chapter reviews the existing methods and results that may shed light on the stimulus features that organize differential responses within each of these regions.
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“Theory of mind is also strongly associated with executive function and involves many of the same neural structures (for example the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex and the temporo-parietal junction) (Carlson and Moses, 2001; Koster-Hale and Saxe, 2013; Powell and Carey, 2017).”
From Montessori Preschool Elevates and Equalizes Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study (2017) · cites this paper as Koster-Hale and Saxe, 2013
Citations
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“Other literature suggests that the RTPJ is involved in maintaining a representation of one's own body, by integrating multi-sensory information and locating the body in space (Blanke et al., 2005; Blanke & Arzy, 2005; Tsakiris et al., 2008).”
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Activity in Right Temporo-Parietal Junction is Not Selective for Theory-of-Mind
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“In fact, the region that is recruited during exogenous attention tasks is so close to the region recruited during ToM tasks that some concluded that these are actually just two different ways to identify the same region (Corbetta, Kincade, Ollinger, McAvoy & Shulman, 2000; Mitchell, 2008).”
BackgroundInfluentialThe Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction
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“Experiments that ask people to mentally rotate their own body or imagine their body in different parts of space, as well as those that induce changes in bodily self-perception (with e.g. rubber hands) fi nd activation in this region (Arzy, Thut, Mohr, Michel, & Blanke, 2006; Blanke & Arzy, 2005).”
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Self-citationRepetition suppression of ventromedial prefrontal activity during judgments of self and others
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“As described above, this was also true of the regions involved in biological motion perception (Gobbini et al., 2007) and exogenous attention (Decety & Lamm, 2007; Scholz et al., 2009); these almost completely non-overlapping in individual subjects.”
BackgroundSelf-citationClan mentality: evidence that the medial prefrontal cortex responds to close others
Krienen, F. M., Tu, P.-C., & Buckner, R. L. (2010) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2180-10.2010 · Cited by 256 · cited 1×
“Conway, Lowder, & Cabeza, 2011), interpersonal closeness (people who are closer, or more important to the self elicit responses more ventrally, Krienen et al., 2010), or affective content ( " hot " affective states elicit responses more ventrally (Ames, Jenkins, Banaji, & Mitchell, 2008;…”
BackgroundInnocent intentions: A correlation between forgiveness for accidental harm and neural activity☆
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Self-citationYoung, L., Dodell-Feder, D., & Saxe, R. (2010) · Neuropsychologia · doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.05.012 · Cited by 208 · cited 3×
“In the absence of specifi c background information about the believer, there is no difference in the response of any ToM region to absurd vs. commonsense beliefs (e.g. " John believes that swimming in the pool is a good way to grow fi ns/cool off, " Young et al., 2010b).”
BackgroundSelf-citationAn fMRI Investigation of Spontaneous Mental State Inference for Moral Judgment
Young, L., & Saxe, R. (2009) · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21137 · Cited by 208
Self-citationGweon, H., Dodell-Feder, D., Bedny, M., & Saxe, R. (2012) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01829.x · Cited by 206 · cited 5×
“…listening to any information about characters in the story, including the characters’ physical appearance or social relationships (Saxe et al., 2009; Gweon et al., 2012), whereas in older children and adults, the ToM brain regions are recruited only when listening to information about thoughts and…”
BackgroundInfluentialTaking Another Person's Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing
Ames, D. L., Jenkins, A. C., Banaji, M. R., & Mitchell, J. P. (2008) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02135.x · Cited by 162
St. Jacques, P. L., Conway, M. A., Lowder, M. W., & Cabeza, R. (2011) · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1162/jocn.2010.21518 · Cited by 113
Apperly, I. A., Samson, D., Chiavarino, C., Bickerton, W.-L., & Humphreys, G. W. (2007) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.04.012 · Cited by 68 · cited 1×
“…due to the latter: individuals often simply reduce the information they need to process by choosing not to represent true beliefs as a mental state (Apperly et al., 2007), and when this is controlled for, neuroimaging has revealed indistinguishably high activation for true and false beliefs (D ö…”
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The brain’s default network: updated anatomy, physiology and evolving insights
Buckner, R. L., & DiNicola, L. M. (2019) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/s41583-019-0212-7 · Cited by 1,058
Neural synchrony in mother-child conversation: Exploring the role of conversation patterns
Nguyen, T., Schleihauf, H., Kayhan, E., Matthes, D., Vrtička, P., & Hoehl, S. (2021) · Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa079 · Cited by 165
“Activation in temporo-parietal areas and particularly the TPJ is associated with the mentalizing system, which is implicated in both children and adults when trying to understand others’ mental states (Frith and Frith, 2006; Koster-Hale and Saxe, 2013).”
BackgroundMontessori Preschool Elevates and Equalizes Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study
Lillard, A. S., Heise, M. J., Richey, E. M., Tong, X., Hart, A., & Bray, P. M. (2017) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01783 · Cited by 150
Metadata
- Authors
- Koster-Hale, J., & Saxe, R.
- ORCID
- Saxe, Rebecca
- Venue
- Understanding Other Minds
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 2013-08-22
- Pages
- 132-163
- OpenAlex
- W52278643
- Cited by
- 104
- References
- 34
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 7
- FWCI
- 10.18
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Oxford University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Keywords
- theory of mind, functional neuroimaging, brain regions, stimulus characteristics, phrenology
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