Linked Life Data

17551089

Source:http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/id/17551089

Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
2
pubmed:dateCreated
2008-1-29
pubmed:abstractText
Recent researchers have suggested that a region of right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) selectively subserves the attribution of beliefs to other people (Saxe R, Kanwisher N. 2003. People thinking about thinking people: fMRI investigations of theory of mind. NeuroImage. 19:1835-1842; Saxe R, Powell LJ. 2006. It's the thought that counts: specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind. Psychol Sci. 17:692-699; Saxe R, Wexler A. 2005. Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia. 43:1391-1399). At the same time, a similar RTPJ region has been observed repeatedly in a variety of nonsocial tasks that require participants to redirect attention to task-relevant stimuli (e.g., Corbetta M, Shulman GL. 2002. Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 3:201-215; Serences JT, Shomstein S, Leber AB, Golay X, Egeth HE, Yantis S. 2005. Coordination of voluntary and stimulus-driven attentional control in human cortex. Psychol Sci. 16:114-122). However, because these 2 sets of tasks have never been compared within the same participants, it remains unclear whether these observations refer to the exact same region of RTPJ or may instead involve neighboring regions with distinct functional profiles. To test the claim that there is a region of RTPJ selective for belief attribution, the current study used functional neuroimaging to examine the extent to which cortical loci identified by a "theory-of-mind localizer" also distinguish between trials on a target detection task that varied demands to reorient attention (i.e., a version of the "Posner cueing task"). Results were incompatible with claims of RTPJ selectivity for mental state attribution. Regardless of whether regions were defined from group analyses or were individually tailored for each participant, RTPJ activity was also modulated by the nonsocial attentional task. The overlap between theory-of-mind and attentional reorienting suggests the need for new accounts of RTPJ function that integrate across these disparate task comparisons.
pubmed:grant
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Feb
pubmed:issn
1460-2199
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Electronic
pubmed:volume
18
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
262-71
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
2008
pubmed:articleTitle
Activity in right temporo-parietal junction is not selective for theory-of-mind.
pubmed:affiliation
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall 1320, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. mitchell@wjh.harvard.edu
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural