The 5258 Journal of Neuroscience, June 15, 2003 23(12):5258 5263
"Hey John": Signals Conveying Communicative Intention toward the Self Activate Brain Regions Associated with "Mentalizing," Regardless of Modality
Knut K. W. Kampe,1,2 Chris D. Frith,3 and Uta Frith1
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom, 2Department of Neurology, Universittsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246 Hamburg, Germany, and 3Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom
1
Successful communication between two people depends first on the recognition of the intention to communicate. Such intentions may be conveyed by signals directed at the self, such as calling a person's name or making eye contact. In this study we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the perception of these two signals, which differ in modality and sensory channel, activate common brain regions: the paracingulate cortex and temporal poles bilaterally. These regions are part of a network that has been consistently activated when people are asked to think about the mental states of others. Activation of this network is independent of arousal as measured by changes in pupil diameter. Key words: Theory of Mind; mentalizing; eye gaze; faces; names; medial prefrontal cortex; paracingulate cortex; temporal poles; fMRI; autism
Introduction
The cognitive process underlying our ability to attribute intentions to self and others has been termed the "Theory of Mind" (Premack and Woodruff, 1978), the "intentional stance" (Dennett, 1987), or "mentalizing" (Frith et al., 1991). Far from being a complex process of conscious inferences, mentalizing is thought to be an automatic cognitive process (Leslie, 1987; Scholl and Leslie, 1999) and may not require a deliberate decision to attend. Mentalizing appears to rest on a dedicated neural system, as a number of neuroimaging studies indicate (Fletcher et al., 1995; Goel et al., 1995; Baron-Cohen et al., 1999; Gallagher et al., 2000; Brunet et al., 2000; Castelli et al., 2000; Vogeley et al., 2001; McCabe et al., 2001). The three cortical regions most consistently activated during mentalizing are the paracingulate cortex, the temporal poles, and the superior temporal sulcus at the temporoparietal junction (Frith, 2001). Individuals with autism, who typically fail mentalizing tasks, show reduced activation during mentalizing in these regions (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Castelli et al., 2002), and in the paracingulate region in particular (Happe et al., 1996). The question we wished to address was whether the neural circuit involved in mentalizing is also engaged in the initial stage of communication, when the intention to communicate is signaled. Typically, a subject has to recognize that such a signal is directed at himself. If recognizing the communicative intention of another toward oneself triggers the mentalizing mechanism,
Received Nov. 13, 2002; revised March 27, 2003; accepted March 31, 2003. This research was facilitated by the Medical Research Council Cooperative in "Analysis of cognitive impairment and imaging of cognition" at University College London. We thank Oliver Josephs for providing the program to create scrambl...
kampe