Impaired spontaneous belief inference following acquired damage to the left posterior temporoparietal junction
Open accessAbstract
Efficient social interactions require taking into account other people's mental states such as their beliefs, intentions or emotions. Recent studies have shown that in some social situations at least, we do spontaneously take into account others' mental states. The extent to which we have dedicated brain areas for such spontaneous perspective taking is however still unclear. Here, we report two brain-damaged patients whose common lesions were almost exclusively in the left posterior temporoparietal junction (TPJp) and who both showed the same striking and distinctive theory of mind (ToM) deficit. More specifically, they had an inability to take into account someone else's belief unless they were explicitly instructed to tell what that other person thinks or what that person will do. These patients offer a unique insight into the causal link between a specific subregion of the TPJ and a specific cognitive facet of ToM.
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The TPJ contributes to mentalizing and emotional state inference/attribution.
“TPJ contributes to the mentalizing and emotional state inference/attribution”
From The Functional Role of Dreaming in Emotional Processes (2019) · cites this paper as Biervoye et al., 2016
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The Functional Role of Dreaming in Emotional Processes
Scarpelli, S., Bartolacci, C., D'Atri, A., Gorgoni, M., & De Gennaro, L. (2019) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00459 · Cited by 190 · see citing works
“In particular, TPJ contributes to thementalizing and emotional state inference/attribution (Donaldson et al., 2015; Ye et al., 2015; Biervoye et al., 2016).”
Background
- Authors
- Biervoye, A., Dricot, L., Ivanoiu, A., & Samson, D.
- Affiliations
- UCLouvain (BE)
- Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc (BE)
- Corresponding author
- Samson, Dana
- Venue
- Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2016-06-17
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 1513-1520
- ISSN
- 1749-5016 (ISSN-L)
- 1749-5024
- PMC
- PMC5040917
- OpenAlex
- W2421648612
- Cited by
- 48
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2025: 17 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 9.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Libraries (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital
- 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, belief inference, social cognition, acquired brain injury
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Aged, Emotions, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Parietal Lobe, Social Perception, Temporal Lobe, Thinking, Intention, Theory of Mind
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