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regions showing increased activation to the animations during selective attention to Behavioral versus Spatial properties
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Animations of simple geometric shapes are readily interpreted as animate agents engaged in meaningful social interactions. Such animations have been shown to activate brain regions implicated in the detection of animate motion, in understanding the intentions of others as well as areas commonly linked to the processing of social and emotional infor...
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Context 1
... of the social brain ROIs showed increased activation when animation viewing followed the Behavioral cue relative to the Spatial cue: right FG, amygdalae (bilaterally), PCC (bilaterally), right TPJ, right STS, DMPFC (bilaterally), and TP (bilaterally) (Fig. 3, Table 1). Activation in right TPJ, right STS, right TP, right amygdala, bilateral FG, and right PCC was also increased when comparing animation viewing following the Behavioral cue relative to baseline, as was activation in posterior parietal cortex, DLPFC, hMT, and FEFs (see online Supplementary Table 1). ...Similar publications
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Citations
... Therefore, we are interested in investigating the stimulation of target brain areas as a way to boost bias towards positive resilience-related words in people who report low PTG. Specifically, previous research using neuroimage and other neuroscience techniques has shown that the superior temporal sulcus (STS) is part of the mentalizing network [26] recruited for processing intentionality associated with goals [27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and social information [34], and it is usually stronger in the right hemisphere [35]. This makes this area particularly suitable for examining whether brain stimulation of it would increase attention towards words associated with intentionality. ...
Background/Objectives: Post-traumatic growth (PTG) has the potential to draw positive consequences from trauma. Hence, there is interest in finding ways to promote PTG. Research has identified an attentional bias towards positive resilience-related words (e.g., “persistence”, “purpose”) in university students who report high PTG after experiencing adversities. Although people can respond to these experiences by showing low PTG, this bias seems to help with their struggle by making purposeful contents more accessible. Therefore, boosting attentional bias towards positive resilience-related words could help people with low PTG. Methods: In this study, the participants were thirty-six university students who had experienced bullying before entering university. Using a Stroop emotional task, they identified the color of resilience and neutral words, either positive or negative, before and after being submitted to transcranial direct current stimulation. Stimulation was targeted at the right temporal area involved in intentionality processing. Results: In the anodal condition, the results support a stimulation effect on the resilience attentional bias that could benefit participants with low PTG. A significant moderation of approach motivation for this effect was also found. Specifically, only when participants had medium or high approach motivation did stimulation boost the attentional bias in students with low PTG. Conclusions: These results support that tDCS stimulation in this brain area is effective in enhancing resilience attentional bias in low-PTG students. However, for this effect to occur it is necessary to have approach motivation, which is motivation related to goals.
... Therefore, we are interested in investigating the stimulation of target brain areas as a way to boost a bias towards positive resilience-related words in people who report low PTG. Specifically, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) is part of the mentalizing network [19] recruited for processing intentionality associated with goals [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and social information [27], and it is usually stronger in the right hemisphere [28]. This makes this area particularly suitable for examining whether transcranial direct current stimulation of it would increase a ention towards words associated with intentionality. ...
Background/Objectives: Post traumatic growth (PTG) has the potential to draw positive consequences from trauma. Hence, the interest of finding ways to promote PTG. Research has identified an attentional bias towards positive resilience-related words (e.g., “persistence”, “purpose”) in university students who report high PTG after experiencing adversities. Although people can respond to these experiences by showing low PTG, this bias seems to help with their struggle by making purposeful contents more accessible. Therefore, boosting attentional bias towards positive resilience-related words could help people with low PTG. Methods: In this study, the participants were thirty-six university students who had experienced bullying before entering university. Using a Stroop emotional task, they identified the color of resilience and neutral words, either positive or negative, before and after being submitted to transcranial direct current stimulation. Stimulation was targeted at the right temporal area involved in intentionality processing. Results: In the anodal condition, the results support a stimulation effect on the resilience attentional bias that could benefit participants with low PTG. A significant moderation of approach motivation for this effect was also found. Specifically, only when participants had medium or high approach motivation, did stimulation boost the attentional bias in students with low PTG. Conclusions: These results support that tDCS stimulation in this brain area is effective in enhancing resilience attentional bias in low PTG students. However, for this effect to occur it is necessary to have approach motivation, which is motivation related to goals.
... It is worth mentioning that the activation of the social cognitive network is also influenced by cueing and attention, specifically with Heider-Simmel style animations. In an fMRI study, Tavares et al. (2008) showed significant boosts in the social brain network when selective attention was paid to social meaning vs. to spatial properties of the movies. Participants were cued either by the word "behavioral" or by "spatial" before observing animations that showed two circles (i.e., agents) moving through constraints. ...
Among a variety of entities in their environment, what do humans consider alive or animate and how does this attribution of animacy promote development of more abstract levels of mentalizing? By decontextualizing the environment of bodily features, we review how physical movements give rise to perceived animacy in Heider-Simmel style animations. We discuss the developmental course of how perceived animacy shapes our interpretation of the social world, and specifically discuss when and how children transition from perceiving actions as goal-directed to attributing behaviors to unobservable mental states. This transition from a teleological stance, asserting a goal-oriented interpretation to an agent's actions, to a mentalistic stance allows older children to reason about more complex actions guided by hidden beliefs. The acquisition of these more complex cognitive behaviors happens developmentally at the same time neural systems for social cognition are coming online in young children. We review perceptual, developmental, and neural evidence to identify the joint cognitive and neural changes associated with when children begin to mentalize and how this ability is instantiated in the brain.
... In this regard, it has been shown that approach/avoidance intentionality recruits the mentalizing network, and particularly the rSTS either with objects (Vander Wyk et al., 2009) or persons in social perception with greater activation in approach than avoidance (Pelphrey and Morris, 2006;Pelphrey and Carter, 2008;Saitovitch et al., 2012;Johnson et al., 2015;Yang et al., 2015), and also in mutual liking (Flores et al., 2018). Likewise, Ross and Olson (2010) (see also Tavares et al., 2008), using a version of the Heider and Simmel animation task in an fMRI study, reported the activation of more anterior aspects of the rSTS when participants judged "friendship" from simple geometric shape interactions. Similarly, Gobbini et al. (2007) have reported activation along the full length of the rSTS when participants observed Heider and Simmel animations and made social intentional judgments of interactions. ...
... Understanding attitudes and intentionality of human actions recruit the Mentalizing Network (Gobbini et al., 2007;Spunt et al., 2010;Dodell-Feder et al., 2011;Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012), which includes the superior temporal area, around the rSTS. Beyond the role of the rSTS in processing approach attitudes in social perception (e.g., mutual vs. averted gaze) (Pelphrey and Morris, 2006;Pelphrey and Carter, 2008;Saitovitch et al., 2012;Johnson et al., 2015;Yang et al., 2015) and with the Heider and Simmel task (Gobbini et al., 2007;Tavares et al., 2008;Ross and Olson, 2010), our study has shown that approach and avoidance are also represented by language and demonstrates that rSTS stimulation improves the processing of approach attitudinal verbs. ...
Language describes approach/avoidance intentionality by means of attitudinal verbs (e.g., accept vs. reject). The right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS) has been shown to be recruited in processing action goals and approach intentionality in social contexts. In this study, we examine whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of this area improves the processing of attitudinal verbs (either of approach or avoidance) in the context of affirmative and negative sentences [e.g., Julio (did not)/included meat on the grocery list]. After being subjected to tDCS, 46 participants were given sentences for passive reading. Sentences were displayed in segments with a fixed time of exposition, and a verb, either the one mentioned in the sentence or an alternative one was displayed 1,500 ms after the sentence (e.g., included vs. excluded, in the example). Participants were told to read them and then press the space bar to continue the experiment. Results showed shorter latencies for approach verbs that were either mentioned in approach sentences or the alternatives in avoidance sentences, both in affirmative and negative versions under anodal conditions compared to sham conditions. Thus, the anodal stimulation of rSTS affected the accessibility of approach verbs that were not modulated either by being mentioned or by sentence polarity. In addition, mentioned verbs had shorter reading times than the alternative ones in negative sentences in the anodal vs. sham condition. This suggests that stimulation caused an effect of negation in the activation of the mentioned verb. Implications are discussed in the context of the role of the rSTS in processing attitudinal verbs and negation to understand better approach and avoidance mediated by language in the framework of the two-step model of negation processing.
... In other words, humans process social information of a scene by default (compared to physical information). Because the default mode network overlap with the social network 6,7,9,30,31 , the result would be, in an early stage, to form a representation of the robot's behaviour with reference to mental states (i.e. mentalizing www.nature.com/scientificreports/ the behaviours, referring to beliefs, desires and intentions) faster than with reference to mechanistic states [43] as a form of automatic 32,33 initial tendency stream 34,35 . ...
How individuals interpret robots’ actions is a timely question in the context of the general approach to increase robot’s presence in human social environment in the decades to come. Facing robots, people might have a tendency to explain their actions in mentalistic terms, granting them intentions. However, how default or controllable this process is still under debate. In four experiments, we asked participants to choose between mentalistic (intentional) and mechanistic (non-intentional) descriptions to describe depicted actions of a robot in various scenarios. Our results show the primacy of mentalistic descriptions that are processed faster than mechanistic ones (experiment 1). This effect was even stronger under high vs low cognitive load when people had to decide between the two alternatives (experiment 2). Interestingly, while there was no effect of cognitive load at the later stages of the processing arguing for controllability (experiment 3), imposing cognitive load on participants at an early stage of observation resulted in a faster attribution of mentalistic properties to the robot (experiment 4). We discuss these results in the context of the idea that social cognition is a default system.
... The Type 2 requires cognitive decoupling and higher amount of cognitive resources, resulting in a slower but controlled processing. Some authors posit that the social cognition would be based on Type 1 cognition (Iacoboni et al., 2004;Jack, Dawson, & Norr, 2013;Saris et al., 2020;Tavares et al., 2008). The reason would be that social functioning is necessary for human survival (Eisenberger & Cole, 2012;Humphrey, 1976;Valtorta et al., 2018). ...
... First, a social cognition as an automatic path based on the social perception of the environment and the activation of social representation (social schema, social scripts). Second, a physical cognition as a non-automatic path focused on the concreteness of stimuli and empirical rules (Jack, Dawson, Begany, et al., 2013;Mars et al., 2012;Tavares et al., 2008). With respect to this framework, we proposed that human perception facing human-like agents' (such as humanoid robots) behaviours, would be first social resulting in anthropomorphic attributions but could be actively controlled to switch to physical reasoning about the target (Heider & Simmel, 1950;Jack, Dawson, Begany, et al., 2013;Tavares et al., 2008) and more target-specific (compared to anthropomorphic) ...
... Second, a physical cognition as a non-automatic path focused on the concreteness of stimuli and empirical rules (Jack, Dawson, Begany, et al., 2013;Mars et al., 2012;Tavares et al., 2008). With respect to this framework, we proposed that human perception facing human-like agents' (such as humanoid robots) behaviours, would be first social resulting in anthropomorphic attributions but could be actively controlled to switch to physical reasoning about the target (Heider & Simmel, 1950;Jack, Dawson, Begany, et al., 2013;Tavares et al., 2008) and more target-specific (compared to anthropomorphic) ...
Humanoid robots are predicted to be increasingly present in the everyday life of millions of people worldwide. Humans make sense these artificial agents’ actions mainly through the attribution of human characteristics, a process called anthropomorphism. However, despite a large number of studies, how the representation of artificial agents is constructed remains an open question. Here, we aim at integrating the process of anthropomorphism into the cognitive control theory, that postulates that we adapt resources management for information processing according to the current situation. In three experiments, we manipulated the cognitive load of participants while being observed by a humanoid robot to investigate how it could impact the online adaptation of the mental representation of the robot. The first two experiments indicated an online control of demanding resources in order to switch from an intentional to a physical representation, therefore inhibiting anthropomorphic, i.e. social, inferences. The third experiment investigated how the goals of the observing robot, i.e. “what” versus “why” is the robot observing, influences the effect of the cognitive load, showing that an explicit focus on its intentionality automatically biases cognitive processes towards anthropomorphism, yielding insights on how we mentally represent interacting robots when cognitive control theory and robots’ anthropomorphism are considered together.
... Whereas social perception of approach/avoidance intentionality activates posterior aspects of rSTS, several studies have supported that more abstract and conceptual processing of relationship intentionality recruits more anterior to middle aspects of rSTS. For example [19] (see also [20]), using a version of the Heider and Simmel animation task in a fMRI study, reported activation of more anterior aspects of rSTS when participants judged "friendship" from simple geometric shape interactions. Similarly [4] have reported activation along the full length of rSTS when participants observed Heider and Simmel animations and made social intentional judgements of interactions. ...
In this case, 62 university students participated in the study, in which a between-subjects design was adopted. Participants were also given the behavioral approach system (BAS) and behavioral inhibition system (BIS) scales. Participants had to read a list of 60 sentences with interpersonal and neutral content: 20 approach (“Pedro accepted Rosa in Whatsapp”), 20 avoidance (“Pedro Blocked Rosa in Whatsapp”) and 20 neutral (“Marta thought about the causes of the problem”). After reading them, they were subjected to 20 min of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in one of the two conditions: anodal (31) or sham (31). After tDCS, they had to read other list of 60 sentences matched in approach, avoidance and neutral contents with the former list. We found significant improvement in reading speed after anodal stimulation for social and neutral sentences. Regarding affective traits, we found that anodal stimulation benefitted reading speed in low-BIS and low-BAS participants and had no effect in either high BAS or high BIS participants. In addition, tDCS improvement in reading speed was significantly lower in avoidance sentences in low-BIS (avoidance) participants. We discuss these results at the light of previous research and highlight the importance of approach and avoidance traits as moderators of tDCS effects.
... Rather, this study examined basic mechanisms associated with passive viewing of animacy. However, previous work suggests that an increase in activity in areas like the pSTS and its surroundings is commensurate with the degree of social perception and other mentalizing abilities [12,18,83]. ...
While aging is associated with social-cognitive change and oxytocin plays a crucial role in social cognition, oxytocin’s effects on the social brain in older age remain understudied. To date, no study has examined the effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin administration on brain mechanisms underlying animacy perception in older adults. Using a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blinded design in generally healthy older men (mean age (SD) = 69(6); n = 17 oxytocin; n = 14 placebo), this study determined the effects of a four-week intranasal oxytocin administration (24 international units/twice a day) on functional MRI (fMRI) during the Heider-Simmel task. This passive-viewing animacy perception paradigm contains video-clips of simple shapes suggesting social interactions (SOCIAL condition) or exhibiting random trajectories (RANDOM condition). While there were no oxytocin-specific effects on brain fMRI activation during the SOCIAL compared to the RANDOM condition, pre-to-post intervention change in the SOCIAL-RANDOM difference in functional connectivity (FC) was higher in the oxytocin compared to the placebo group in a network covering occipital, temporal, and parietal areas, and the superior temporal sulcus, a key structure in animacy perception. These findings suggest oxytocin modulation of circuits involved in action observation and social perception. Follow-up analyses on this network’s connections suggested a pre-to-post intervention decrease in the SOCIAL-RANDOM difference in FC among the placebo group, possibly reflecting habituation to repeated exposure to social cues. Chronic oxytocin appeared to counter this process by decreasing FC during the RANDOM and increasing it during the SOCIAL condition. This study advances knowledge about oxytocin intervention mechanisms in the social brain of older adults.
... Exciting, novel results were also found when comparing social help and social threat animations, as this analysis is rarely completed. The TD children activated the right supramarginal and superior temporal gyri, ToM regions [5,19,26,28,60,61], along with the bilateral middle anterior cingulate, implicated in empathy [62], more to the social help videos, whereas children with NDDs showed greater activation of these regions to social threat. Few studies have specifically examined how the nature of social interactions influences the neural mechanisms underpinning social attribution. ...
... In typical adults, differences in activity in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus have been reported when shapes engage in competitive vs. cooperative behaviour [21,60,61] and pro-social behaviour [63], suggesting that this region may be sensitive to the meaning and content of social interactions. We established that in addition to the right superior temporal area, TD children also preferentially engaged other social-cognitive areas when processing animations depicting social help compared with threat, compared to those with NDDs. ...
Theory of mind (ToM) deficits are common in children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which contribute to their social and cognitive difficulties. The social attribution task (SAT) involves geometrical shapes moving in patterns that depict social interactions and is known to recruit brain regions from the classic ToM network. To better understand ToM in ASD and ADHD children, we examined the neural correlates using the SAT and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a cohort of 200 children: ASD (N = 76), ADHD (N = 74) and typically developing (TD; N = 50) (4–19 years). In the scanner, participants were presented with SAT videos corresponding to social help, social threat, and random conditions. Contrasting social vs. random, the ASD compared with TD children showed atypical activation in ToM brain areas—the middle temporal and anterior cingulate gyri. In the social help vs. social threat condition, atypical activation of the bilateral middle cingulate and right supramarginal and superior temporal gyri was shared across the NDD children, with between-diagnosis differences only being observed in the right fusiform. Data-driven subgrouping identified two distinct subgroups spanning all groups that differed in both their clinical characteristics and brain–behaviour relations with ToM ability.
... Participants were engaged in a visual task involving ToM animated stimuli (Tavares et al., 2008;Tavares et al., 2011). An experimental run consisted of 8 trials, each comprising a sequence of baseline, animation movie, jittering, and question blocks. ...
Background
Social cognition impairment is a key phenomenon in serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BPD). Although genetic and neurobiological studies have suggested common neural correlates, here we hypothesized that a fundamental dissociation of social processing occurs at an early level in these conditions.
Methods
Based on the hypothesis that key structures in the social brain, namely the temporoparietal junction, should present distinctive features in SCZ and BPD during low-level social judgment, we conducted a case-control study in SCZ (n=20) and BPD (n=20) patients and controls (n=20), using task-based fMRI during a Theory-of-Mind (ToM) visual paradigm leading to interpretation of social meaning based on simple geometric figures.
Results
We found opposite neural responses in two core ToM regions: SCZ patients showed social content-related deactivation (relative to controls and BPD) of the right supramarginal gyrus, while the opposite pattern was found in BPD; reverse patterns, relative to controls and SCZ, were found in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, a region involved in inferring other’s intentions. Receiver-operating-characteristic curve analysis showed 88% accuracy in discriminating the two clinical groups based on these neural responses.
Conclusions
These contrasting activation patterns of the temporoparietal junction in SCZ and BPD represent mechanistic differences of social cognitive dysfunction that may be explored as biomarkers or therapeutic targets.
