Movement and mind: a functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns

Social interaction networks in the primate brain

Primate brains have evolved to understand and engage with their social world. Much about the structure of this world can be gleaned from social interactions. Circuits for the analysis of and participation in social interactions have now been mapped. Increased knowledge about their functional specializations and relative spatial locations promises to greatly improve the understanding of the functional organization of the primate social brain. Detailed electrophysiology, as in the case of the face-processing network, of local operations and functional interactions between areas is necessary to uncover neural mechanisms and computation principles of social cognition. New naturalistic behavioral paradigms, behavioral tracking, and new analytical approaches for parallel non-stationary data will be important components toward a neuroscientific theory of primates' interactive minds.

Aberrant effective connectivity is associated with positive symptoms in first-episode schizophrenia

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We use DCM in patients newly diagnosed with schizophrenia.

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Patients were naïve to therapeutic antipsychotics, but not completely drug naïve.

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Patients have stronger feedforward connectivity than matched healthy controls.

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Stronger positive symptoms are associated with disinhibition in the temporal lobe.

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In active inference, this may relate to aberrant precision and prediction errors.

Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder thought to result from synaptic dysfunction that affects distributed brain connectivity, rather than any particular brain region. While symptomatology is traditionally divided into positive and negative symptoms, abnormal social cognition is now recognized a key component of schizophrenia. Nonetheless, we are still lacking a mechanistic understanding of effective brain connectivity in schizophrenia during social cognition and how it relates to clinical symptomatology. To address this question, we used fMRI and dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to test for abnormal brain connectivity in twenty-four patients with first-episode schizophrenia (FES) compared to twenty-five matched controls performing the Human Connectome Project (HCP) social cognition paradigm. Patients had not received regular therapeutic antipsychotics, but were not completely drug naïve. Whilst patients were less accurate than controls in judging social stimuli from non-social stimuli, our results revealed an increase in feedforward connectivity from motion-sensitive V5 to posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in patients compared to matched controls. At the same time, patients with a higher degree of positive symptoms had more disinhibition within pSTS, a region computationally involved in social cognition. We interpret these findings the framework of active inference, where increased feedforward connectivity may encode aberrant prediction errors from V5 to pSTS and local disinhibition within pSTS may reflect aberrant encoding of the precision of cortical representations about social stimuli.

Pre-exposure to Ambiguous Faces Modulates Top-Down Control of Attentional Orienting to Counterpredictive Gaze Cues

Understanding and reacting to others' nonverbal social signals, such as changes in gaze direction (i.e., gaze cue), are essential for social interactions, as it is important for processes such as joint attention and mentalizing. Although attentional orienting in response to gaze cues has a strong reflexive component, accumulating evidence shows that it can be top-down controlled by context information regarding the signals' social relevance. For example, when a gazer is believed to be an entity "with a mind" (i.e., mind perception), people exert more top-down control on attention orienting. Although increasing an agent's physical human-likeness can enhance mind perception, it could have negative consequences on top-down control of social attention when a gazer's physical appearance is categorically ambiguous (i.e., difficult to categorize as human or nonhuman), as resolving this ambiguity would require using cognitive resources that otherwise could be used to top-down control attention orienting. To examine this question, we used mouse-tracking to explore if categorically ambiguous agents are associated with increased processing costs (Experiment 1), whether categorically ambiguous stimuli negatively impact top-down control of social attention (Experiment 2), and if resolving the conflict related to the agent's categorical ambiguity (using exposure) would restore top-down control to orient attention (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that categorically ambiguous stimuli are associated with cognitive conflict, which negatively impact the ability to exert top-down control on attentional orienting in a counterpredicitive gaze-cueing paradigm; this negative impact, however, is attenuated when being pre-exposed to the stimuli prior to the gaze-cueing task. Taken together, these findings suggest that manipulating physical human-likeness is a powerful way to affect mind perception in human-robot interaction (HRI) but has a diminishing returns effect on social attention when it is categorically ambiguous due to drainage of cognitive resources and impairment of top-down control.

Increased Alexithymia But No Profound Emotion Processing Disorder in Burnout Syndrome

Our objectives were to investigate alexithymia in burnout patients while controlling for depression and anxiety, as well as to evaluate whether alexithymia may be part of a profound emotional processing disorder or of a mentalization deficit. Alexithymia, depressive, and anxious feelings were compared in patients with burnout, depression, and healthy controls using an age-, sex-, and education-matched cross-sectional design (n = 60). A facial emotion recognition task and an emotional mentalizing performance test as well as physical and emotional violation experiences were conducted. Alexithymia was significantly increased in burnout patients, mediated by negative affect in this group. No impairment of facial emotion recognition or mental attribution could be shown. Burnout patients demonstrated slightly increased emotional abuse experiences in early childhood. The present results corroborate the supposition that alexithymia in burnout primarily depends on affect and may rise due to current strain and overload experience, rather than based on a profound developmental disorder in emotion processing.

Sex Differences in Neural Responses to the Perception of Social Interactions

Social interaction is critical to emotional well-being. Previous studies have suggested sex differences in the perception of social interaction. However, the findings depend on the nature of interactions and whether it involves facial emotions. Here, we explored sex differences in neural responses to the perception of social interaction using the Human Connectome Project data. Participants (n = 969, 505 women) were engaged in a social cognition task with geometric objects moving and colliding to simulate social interaction. Behaviorally, men relative to women demonstrated higher accuracy in perceiving social vs. random interactions. Men vs. women showed higher activation in the right superior temporal gyrus, bilateral occipital and posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, and women vs. men showed higher activation in the right inferior frontal cortex, during exposure to social vs. random interactions. In whole-brain regressions, the differences in accuracy rate in identifying social vs. random interactions (AR SOC - AR RAN ) were associated with higher activation in the paracentral lobule (PCL) and lower activation in bilateral anterior insula (AI), pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) in men and women combined, lower activation in bilateral AI, preSMA and left MFG in men alone, and higher activation in the PCL and the medial orbitofrontal cortex in women alone. The latter sex differences were confirmed by slope tests. Further, the PCL activity mediated the correlation between an internalizing syndromal score, as assessed by the Achenbach Self-Report, and (AR SOC - AR RAN ) across all subjects. These findings highlighted sex differences in the behavioral and neural processes underlying the perception of social interaction, as well as the influence of internalizing traits on these processes.

Metastable neural dynamics underlies cognitive performance across multiple behavioural paradigms

Despite resting state networks being associated with a variety of cognitive abilities, it remains unclear how these local areas act in concert to express particular cognitive operations. Theoretical and empirical accounts indicate that large-scale resting state networks reconcile dual tendencies towards integration and segregation by operating in a metastable regime of their coordination dynamics. Metastability may confer important behavioural qualities by binding distributed local areas into large-scale neurocognitive networks. We tested this hypothesis by analysing fMRI data in a large cohort of healthy individuals (N = 566) and comparing the metastability of the brain's large-scale resting network architecture at rest and during the performance of several tasks. Metastability was estimated using a well-defined collective variable capturing the level of 'phase-locking' between large-scale networks over time. Task-based reasoning was principally characterised by high metastability in cognitive control networks and low metastability in sensory processing areas. Although metastability between resting state networks increased during task performance, cognitive ability was more closely linked to spontaneous activity. High metastability in the intrinsic connectivity of cognitive control networks was linked to novel problem solving or fluid intelligence, but was less important in tasks relying on previous experience or crystallised intelligence. Crucially, subjects with resting architectures similar or 'pre-configured' to a task-general arrangement demonstrated superior cognitive performance. Taken together, our findings support a key linkage between the spontaneous metastability of large-scale networks in the cerebral cortex and cognition.

Is There a 'Social' Brain? Implementations and Algorithms

A fundamental question in psychology and neuroscience is the extent to which cognitive and neural processes are specialised for social behaviour, or are shared with other 'non-social' cognitive, perceptual, and motor faculties. Here we apply the influential framework of Marr (1982) across research in humans, monkeys, and rodents to propose that information processing can be understood as 'social' or 'non-social' at different levels. We argue that processes can be socially specialised at the implementational and/or the algorithmic level, and that changing the goal of social behaviour can also change social specificity. This framework could provide important new insights into the nature of social behaviour across species, facilitate greater integration, and inspire novel theoretical and empirical approaches.

Association Between Brain Activation and Functional Connectivity

The origin of the "resting-state" brain activity recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is still uncertain. Here we provide evidence for the neurovascular origins of the amplitude of the low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) and the local functional connectivity density (lFCD) by comparing them with task-induced blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) responses, which are considered a proxy for neuronal activation. Using fMRI data for 2 different tasks (Relational and Social) collected by the Human Connectome Project in 426 healthy adults, we show that ALFF and lFCD have linear associations with the BOLD response. This association was significantly attenuated by a novel task signal regression (TSR) procedure, indicating that task performance enhances lFCD and ALFF in activated regions. We also show that lFCD predicts BOLD activation patterns, as was recently shown for other functional connectivity metrics, which corroborates that resting functional connectivity architecture impacts brain activation responses. Thus, our findings indicate a common source for BOLD responses, ALFF and lFCD, which is consistent with the neurovascular origin of local hemodynamic synchrony presumably reflecting coordinated fluctuations in neuronal activity. This study also supports the development of task-evoked functional connectivity density mapping.

Perceiving and attributing intentionality in schizophrenia

Introduction: People with schizophrenia perform poorly on theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks. They also generate less mental-state language to describe test stimuli depicting intentionality. Some of these individuals also show excessive mentalising when objective cues of intentionality are absent. We tested perceiving and attributing intentionality to resolve this paradox. Methods: 23 schizophrenia patients and 20 healthy controls completed the chasing detection task to assess perceptual sensitivity to cues of intentionality. Other tasks assessed spontaneous attributions of intentionality (irrespective of accuracy) and accurate ToM inferences. Results: Perceptual sensitivity to cues of intentionality did not differ between groups. Patients were less likely to spontaneously attribute intentionality (irrespective of accuracy) or perform ToM tasks accurately. Chasing-detection response bias, but not perceptual sensitivity, correlated with attributions of intentionality. Referential (and to less extent) persecutory ideation associated with excessive mentalising when cues of intentionality were absent. Conclusions: Intentionality can be directly perceived, independent of attributions or inferences, in people with schizophrenia. We conclude that the flow of information from intact perceptual detection to evoke spontaneous attributions of intentionality is disrupted in schizophrenia, with flow-on detrimental effects on accurate ToM reasoning. Referential/persecutory ideation motivates inappropriate mentalising when objective cues of intentionality are absent.

I, Robot: How Human Appearance and Mind Attribution Relate to the Perceived Danger of Robots

Social robots become increasingly human-like in appearance and behaviour. However, a large body of research shows that these robots tend to elicit negative feelings of eeriness, danger, and threat. In the present study, we explored whether and how human-like appearance and mind-attribution contribute to these negative feelings and clarified possible underlying mechanisms. Participants were presented with pictures of mechanical, humanoid, and android robots, and physical anthropomorphism (Studies 1–3), attribution of mind perception of agency and experience (Studies 2 and 3), threat to human–machine distinctiveness, and damage to humans and their identity were assessed for all three robot types. Replicating earlier research, human–machine distinctiveness mediated the influence of anthropomorphic appearance on the perceived damage for humans and their identity, and this mediation was due to anthropomorphic appearance of the robot. Perceived agency and experience did not show similar mediating effects on human–machine distinctiveness, but a positive relation with perceived damage for humans and their identity. Possible explanations are discussed.

Joint Attention During Live Person-to-Person Contact Activates rTPJ, Including a Sub-Component Associated With Spontaneous Eye-to-Eye Contact

Eye-to-eye contact is a spontaneous behavior between interacting partners that occurs naturally during social interactions. However, individuals differ with respect to eye gaze behaviors such as frequency of eye-to-eye contacts, and these variations may reflect underlying differences in social behavior in the population. While the use of eye signaling to indicate a shared object of attention in joint attention tasks has been well-studied, the effects of the natural variation in establishing eye contact during joint attention have not been isolated. Here, we investigate this question using a novel two-person joint attention task. Participants were not instructed regarding the use of eye contacts; thus all mutual eye contact events between interacting partners that occurred during the joint attention task were spontaneous and varied with respect to frequency. We predicted that joint attention systems would be modulated by differences in the social behavior across participant pairs, which could be measured by the frequency of eye contact behavior. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning and eye-tracking to measure the neural signals associated with joint attention in interacting dyads and to record the number of eye contact events between them. Participants engaged in a social joint attention task in which real partners used eye gaze to direct each other's attention to specific targets. Findings were compared to a non-social joint attention task in which an LED cue directed both partners' attention to the same target. The social joint attention condition showed greater activity in right temporoparietal junction than the non-social condition, replicating prior joint attention results. Eye-contact frequency modulated the joint attention activity, revealing bilateral activity in social and high level visual areas associated with partners who made more eye contact. Additionally, when the number of mutual eye contact events was used to classify each pair as either "high eye contact" or "low eye contact" dyads, cross-brain coherence analysis revealed greater coherence between high eye contact dyads than low eye contact dyads in these same areas. Together, findings suggest that variation in social behavior as measured by eye contact modulates activity in a subunit of the network associated with joint attention.

How Do Object Shape, Semantic Cues, and Apparent Velocity Affect the Attribution of Intentionality to Figures With Different Types of Movements?

A series of experiments show that attribution of intentionality to figures depends on the interaction between the type of movement –Theory of Mind (ToM), Goal-Directed (GD), Random (R)– with the presence of human attributes, the way these figures are labeled, and their apparent velocity. In addition, the effect of these conditions or their interaction varies when the use of human nouns –present in the participant’s responses– is statistically controlled. In Experiment 1, one group of participants observed triangular figures (n = 46) and another observed humanized figures, called Stickman figures (n = 38). In ToM movements, participants attributed more intentionality to triangular figures than to Stickman figures. However, in R movements, the opposite trend was observed. In Experiment 2 (n = 42), triangular figures were presented as if they were people and compared to triangular figures presented in Experiment 1. Here, when the figures were labeled as people the attribution of intentionality only increased in R and GD movements, but not in ToM movements. Finally, in Experiment 3, Stickman figures (n = 45) move at a higher (unnatural) speed with higher frames per second (fps) than the Stickman figures of Experiment 1. This manipulation decreased the attribution of intentionality in R and GD movements but not in ToM movements. In general terms, it was found that the human attributes and labels promote the use of human nouns in participants’ responses, while a high apparent speed reduces their use. The use of human nouns was associated to intentionality scores significantly in R movements, but at a lesser extent in GD and ToM movements. We conclude that, although the type of movement is the most important cue in this sort of task, the tendency to attribute intentionality to figures is affected by the interaction between perceptual and semantic cues (figure shape, label, and apparent speed).

Toward Task Connectomics: Examining Whole-Brain Task Modulated Connectivity in Different Task Domains

Human brain anatomical and resting-state functional connectivity have been comprehensively portrayed using MRI, which are termed anatomical and functional connectomes. A systematic examination of tasks modulated whole brain functional connectivity, which we term as task connectome, is still lacking. We analyzed 6 block-designed and 1 event-related designed functional MRI data, and examined whole-brain task modulated connectivity in various task domains, including emotion, reward, language, relation, social cognition, working memory, and inhibition. By using psychophysiological interaction between pairs of regions from the whole brain, we identified statistically significant task modulated connectivity in 4 tasks between their experimental and respective control conditions. Task modulated connectivity was found not only between regions that were activated during the task but also regions that were not activated or deactivated, suggesting a broader involvement of brain regions in a task than indicated by simple regional activations. Decreased functional connectivity was observed in all the 4 tasks and sometimes reduced connectivity was even between regions that were both activated during the task. This suggests that brain regions that are activated together do not necessarily work together. The current study demonstrates the comprehensive task connectomes of 4 tasks, and suggested complex relationships between regional activations and connectivity changes.

Mentalizing during social InterAction: A four component model

Mentalizing, conventionally defined as the process in which we infer the inner thoughts and intentions of others, is a fundamental component of human social cognition. Yet its role, and the nuanced layers involved, in real world social interaction are rarely discussed. To account for this lack of theory, we propose the interactive mentalizing theory (IMT) -to emphasize the role of metacognition in different mentalizing components. We discuss the connection between mentalizing, metacognition, and social interaction in the context of four elements of mentalizing: (i) Metacognition-inference of our own thought processes and social cognitions and which is central to all other components of mentalizing including: (ii) first-order mentalizing-inferring the thoughts and intentions of an agent's mind; (iii) personal second-order mentalizing-inference of other's mentalizing of one's own mind; (iv) Collective mentalizing: which takes at least two forms (a) vicarious mentalizing: adopting another's mentalizing of an agent (i.e., what we think others think of an agent) and (b) co-mentalizing: mentalizing about an agent in conjunction with others' mentalizing of that agent (i.e., conforming to others beliefs about another agent's internal states). The weights of these four elements is determined by metacognitive insight and confidence in one's own or another's mentalizing ability, yielding a dynamic interaction between these circuits. To advance our knowledge on mentalizing during live social interaction, we identify how these subprocesses can be organized by different target agents and facilitated by combining computational modeling and interactive brain approaches.

Social brain dysfunctionality in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and their first-degree relatives: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

The social brain hypothesis is regarded as a powerful theory to understand social cognition. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have specific deficits in social and communicative behavior, but the exact relationship between these deficits and abnormalities in the social brain remains unclear. The high heritability of this disorder makes it important to focus on the first-degree relatives of those affected. Research focusing on genetically at-risk (yet healthy) relatives of patients with ASD is critical to the study of neuroimaging endophenotypes. We conducted a voxel-wise activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 9 functional neuroimaging studies published during the period from 2006 to 2018. These studies included 200 individuals with ASD, 216 unaffected family members (UF), and 235 typical development controls (TD). The voxel-wise significance threshold was p < 0.01 (uncorrected p = 0.001).The ALE meta-analyses showed hyperactivation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) among individuals with ASD and UF, compared with TD individuals. Group comparisons showed greater likelihood of hyperactivation in the amygdala for ASD, compared with UF and TD.

A neurocognitive model of perceptual decision-making on emotional signals

Humans make various kinds of decisions about which emotions they perceive from others. Although it might seem like a split-second phenomenon, deliberating over which emotions we perceive unfolds across several stages of decisional processing. Neurocognitive models of general perception postulate that our brain first extracts sensory information about the world then integrates these data into a percept and lastly interprets it. The aim of the present study was to build an evidence-based neurocognitive model of perceptual decision-making on others' emotions. We conducted a series of meta-analyses of neuroimaging data spanning 30 years on the explicit evaluations of others' emotional expressions. We find that emotion perception is rather an umbrella term for various perception paradigms, each with distinct neural structures that underline task-related cognitive demands. Furthermore, the left amygdala was responsive across all classes of decisional paradigms, regardless of task-related demands. Based on these observations, we propose a neurocognitive model that outlines the information flow in the brain needed for a successful evaluation of and decisions on other individuals' emotions. HIGHLIGHTS: Emotion classification involves heterogeneous perception and decision-making tasks Decision-making processes on emotions rarely covered by existing emotions theories We propose an evidence-based neuro-cognitive model of decision-making on emotions Bilateral brain processes for nonverbal decisions, left brain processes for verbal decisions Left amygdala involved in any kind of decision on emotions.

Attribution of Mental States in Glossolalia: A Direct Comparison With Schizophrenia

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of pseudo-words without consistent semantic meaning and syntactic regularities. Although glossolalia is a culturally embedded religious activity, its connection with psychopathology (e.g., psychotic thought disorder and altered mental state attribution/mentalization) is still a matter of debate. To elucidate this issue, we investigated 32 glossolalists, 32 matched control participants, and 32 patients with schizophrenia using the Animated Triangle Test (ATT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The ATT can detect hypo- and hypermentalization using animations of two moving triangles. Healthy adults describe these as random movements (e.g., bouncing), willed actions (e.g., playing), or they mentalize (e.g., tricking). We found that glossolalists provided more mentalizing descriptions in the ATT random and intentional movement animations relative to the control participants. They also recognized more mental states in the RMET than the controls. None of them had a diagnosis of mental disorders. In contrast, patients with schizophrenia hypermentalized only in the ATT random movement condition, whereas they showed hypomentalization in the ATT intentional movement condition and in the RMET relative the control subjects. Hypermentalization in the ATT positively correlated with intrinsic religiosity in the glossolalia group. In conclusion, our results demonstrated a substantial difference in the mentalizing ability of glossolalists (generalized hypermentalization) and patients with schizophrenia (both hypo- and hypermentalization).

Neural correlates of anxiety under interrogation in guilt or innocence contexts

Interrogation elicits anxiety in individuals under scrutiny regardless of their innocence, and thus, anxious responses to interrogation should be differentiated from deceptive behavior in practical lie detection settings. Despite its importance, not many empirical studies have yet been done to separate the effects of interrogation from the acts of lying or guilt state. The present fMRI study attempted to identify neural substrates of anxious responses under interrogation in either innocent or guilt contexts by developing a modified "Doubt" game. Participants in the guilt condition showed higher brain activations in the right central-executive network and bilateral basal ganglia. Regardless of the person's innocence, we observed higher activation of the salience, theory of mind and sensory-motor networks-areas associated with anxiety-related responses in the interrogative condition, compared to the waived conditions. We further explored two different types of anxious responses under interrogation-true detection anxiety in the guilty (true positive) and false detection anxiety in the innocent (false positive). Differential neural responses across these two conditions were captured at the caudate, thalamus, ventral anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We conclude that anxiety is a common neural response to interrogation, regardless of an individual's innocence, and that there are detectable differences in neural responses for true positive and false positive anxious responses under interrogation. The results of our study highlight a need to isolate complex cognitive processes involved in the deceptive acts from the emotional and regulatory responses to interrogation in lie detection schemes.

Comparison of feature selection methods based on discrimination and reliability for fMRI decoding analysis

BACKGROUND

Feature selection is a crucial step in the machine learning methods that are currently used to assist with decoding brain states from fMRI data. This step can be based on either feature discrimination or feature reliability, but there is no clear evidence indicating which method is more suitable for fMRI data.

METHODS

We used ANOVA and Kendall's concordance coefficient as proxies for the two kinds of feature selection criteria. The performances of both methods were compared using different subject and feature numbers. The study included 987 subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP).

RESULTS

Classification performance suggested that features based on discrimination were more capable of distinguishing between various brain states for any number of subjects or extracted features. In addition, reliability-based features were always more stable than other features, and these properties (discernment and stability) of features, to some degree, related to the number of subjects and features. Furthermore, when the number of extracted features increased, the feature distributions also gradually extended from occipital lobe to more association regions of the brain.

CONCLUSION

The results from this study provide empirical guides for feature selection for the prediction of individual brain states.

Developmental changes in visual responses to social interactions

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Children show less interaction selectivity in the pSTS than adults.

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Adults show bilateral pSTS selectivity, while children are more right-lateralized.

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Exploratory findings suggest interaction selectivity in pSTS is more focally tuned in adults.

Recent evidence demonstrates that a region of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is selective to visually observed social interactions in adults. In contrast, little is known about neural responses to social interactions in children. Here, we used fMRI to ask whether the pSTS is ‘tuned’ to social interactions in children at all, and if so, how selectivity might differ from adults. This was investigated in the pSTS, along with several other socially-tuned regions in neighbouring temporal cortex: extrastriate body area, face selective STS, fusiform face area, and mentalizing selective temporo-parietal junction.

Both children and adults showed selectivity to social interaction within right pSTS, while only adults showed selectivity on the left. Adults also showed both more focal and greater selectivity than children (6–12 years) bilaterally. Exploratory sub-group analyses showed that younger children (6–8), but not older children (9–12), are less selective than adults on the right, while there was a continuous developmental trend (adults > older > younger) in left pSTS. These results suggest that, over development, the neural response to social interactions is characterized by increasingly more selective, focal, and bilateral pSTS responses, a process that likely continues into adolescence.

Brain stimulation to left prefrontal cortex modulates attentional orienting to gaze cues

In social interactions, we rely on non-verbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behaviour of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behaviour, a process called mind perception. While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to mind perception, research has just begun to examine how mind perception affects social-cognitive mechanisms like gaze processing on a neuronal level. In the current experiment, participants performed a social attention task (i.e. attentional orienting to gaze cues) with either a human or a robot agent (i.e. manipulation of mind perception) while transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was applied to prefrontal and temporo-parietal brain areas. The results show that temporo-parietal stimulation did not modulate mechanisms of social attention, neither in response to the human nor in response to the robot agent, whereas prefrontal stimulation enhanced attentional orienting in response to human gaze cues and attenuated attentional orienting in response to robot gaze cues. The findings suggest that mind perception modulates low-level mechanisms of social cognition via prefrontal structures, and that a certain degree of mind perception is essential in order for prefrontal stimulation to affect mechanisms of social attention. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) item analysis of empathy and theory of mind

In contrast to conventional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis across participants, item analysis allows generalizing the observed neural response patterns from a specific stimulus set to the entire population of stimuli. In the present study, we perform an item analysis on an fMRI paradigm (EmpaToM) that measures the neural correlates of empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM). The task includes a large stimulus set (240 emotional vs. neutral videos to probe empathic responding and 240 ToM or factual reasoning questions to probe ToM), which we tested in two large participant samples (N = 178, N = 130). Both, the empathy‐related network comprising anterior insula, anterior cingulate/dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, and dorsal temporoparietal junction/supramarginal gyrus (TPJ) and the ToM related network including ventral TPJ, superior temporal gyrus, temporal poles, and anterior and posterior midline regions, were observed across participants and items. Regression analyses confirmed that these activations are predicted by the empathy or ToM condition of the stimuli, but not by low‐level features such as video length, number of words, syllables or syntactic complexity. The item analysis also allowed for the selection of the most effective items to create optimized stimulus sets that provide the most stable and reproducible results. Finally, reproducibility was shown in the replication of all analyses in the second participant sample. The data demonstrate (a) the generalizability of empathy and ToM related neural activity and (b) the reproducibility of the EmpaToM task and its applicability in intervention and clinical imaging studies.

Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project

Background

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with key deficits in social functioning. It is widely assumed that the biological underpinnings of social impairment are neurofunctional alterations in the “social brain,” a neural circuitry involved in inferring the mental state of a social partner. However, previous evidence comes from small-scale studies and findings have been mixed. We therefore carried out the to-date largest study on neural correlates of mentalizing in ASD.

Methods

As part of the Longitudinal European Autism Project, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging at six European sites in a large, well-powered, and deeply phenotyped sample of individuals with ASD (N = 205) and typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 189) aged 6 to 30 years. We presented an animated shapes task to assess and comprehensively characterize social brain activation during mentalizing. We tested for effects of age, diagnosis, and their association with symptom measures, including a continuous measure of autistic traits.

Results

We observed robust effects of task. Within the ASD sample, autistic traits were moderately associated with functional activation in one of the key regions of the social brain, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. However, there were no significant effects of diagnosis on task performance and no effects of age and diagnosis on social brain responses. Besides a lack of mean group differences, our data provide no evidence for meaningful differences in the distribution of brain response measures. Extensive control analyses suggest that the lack of case-control differences was not due to a variety of potential confounders.

Conclusions

Contrary to prior reports, this large-scale study does not support the assumption that altered social brain activation during mentalizing forms a common neural marker of ASD, at least with the paradigm we employed. Yet, autistic individuals show socio-behavioral deficits. Our work therefore highlights the need to interrogate social brain function with other brain measures, such as connectivity and network-based approaches, using other paradigms, or applying complementary analysis approaches to assess individual differences in this heterogeneous condition.

Pigeons process actor-action configurations more readily than bystander-action configurations

Behavior requires an actor. Two experiments using complex conditional action discriminations examined whether pigeons privilege information related to the digital actor who is engaged in behavior. In Experiment 1, each of two video displays contained a digital model, one an actor engaged in one of two behaviors (Indian dance or martial arts) and one a neutrally posed bystander. To correctly classify the display, the pigeons needed to conditionally process the action in conjunction with distinctive physical features of the actor or the bystander. Four actor-conditional pigeons learned to correctly discriminate the actions based on the identity of the actors, whereas four bystander-conditional birds failed to learn. Experiment 2 established that this failure was not due to the latter group's inability to spatially integrate information across the distance between the two models. Potentially, the colocalization of the relevant model identity and the action was critical due to a fundamental configural or integral representation of these properties. These findings contribute to our understanding of the evolution of action recognition, the recognition of social behavior, and forms of observational learning by animals.

Cortical temporal hierarchy is immature in middle childhood

The development of successful social-cognitive abilities requires one to track, accumulate, and integrate knowledge of other people's mental states across time. Regions of the brain differ in their temporal scale (i.e., a cortical temporal hierarchy) and those receptive to long temporal windows may facilitate social-cognitive abilities; however, the cortical development of long timescale processing remains to be investigated. The current study utilized naturalistic viewing to examine cortical development of long timescale processing and its relation to social-cognitive abilities in middle childhood - a time of expanding social spheres and increasing social-cognitive abilities. We found that, compared to adults, children exhibited reduced low-frequency power in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and reduced specialization for long timescale processing within the TPJ and other regions broadly implicated in the default mode network and higher-order visual processing. Further, specialization for long timescales within the right dorsal medial prefrontal cortex became more 'adult-like' as a function of children's comprehension of character mental states. These results suggest that cortical temporal hierarchy in middle childhood is immature and may be important for an accurate representation of complex naturalistic social stimuli during this age.

A new semi-nonverbal task glance, moderate role of cognitive flexibility in ADHD children's theory of mind

Introduction: Studies have documented both executive functions (EF) impairment in children with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) and Theory of Mind (ToM), yielding mixed results, possibly because of a variety of tasks used, all requiring different levels of language skills.Aim: To investigate the relationship between ToM and EF with non-language-based tasks.Methods: Thirty ADHD (7-9 years old) were compared to thirty controls (age and IQ matched). Participants' ToM was assessed using the Animated Triangles task and two EF tasks, namely spatial control test, the Stockings Of Cambridge (SOC) and rule and acquisition test, the Intra-Extra Dimensional set shift (IED)-from the neuropsychological battery of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB).Results: ADHD group had a significant ToM and EF impairment relative to the control group. ToM was not significantly correlated with EF; however, the performance on IED tasks affected the performance on ToM tasks.Discussion: The study provides evidence for a link between the abilities to attribute correct mental states to others, planning and shifting attention in ADHD children, suggesting the ability to rely on cognitive flexibility in the face of a changing environment plays a role in explaining the association between ToM and EF.

A novel social attribution paradigm: The Dynamic Interacting Shape Clips (DISC)

The Dynamic Interacting Shape Clips (DISC) is a novel stimulus set designed to examine mentalizing, specifically social attribution, suitable for use with diverse methodologies including fMRI. The DISC offer some advantages compared to other social attribution stimuli including a large number of stimuli, subsets of stimuli depicting different kinds of social interactions (i.e., friendly approach, aggression, and avoidance), and two control tasks-one that contrasts interpretations of socially contingent movement versus random, inanimate movement, and the other that examines the impact of attentional shifts on mentalizing using the same visual stimuli with a different cue. This study describes both behavioral and fMRI findings from a sample of 22 typically developing adults (m_age = 21.7 years, SD = 1.72). Behavioral data supports participants anthropomorphized the stimuli and the social intent of the clips were perceived as intended. Neuroimaging findings demonstrate that brain areas associated with processing animacy and mental state attribution were activated when participants were shown clips featuring social interactions compared to random movement, and when attention was cued to social versus physical aspects of the same stimuli. Results lend empirical support for the use of the DISC in future studies of social cognition.

Outcome-Based Evaluations of Social Interaction Valence in a Contingent Response Context

Previous studies have indicated that social evaluations rely heavily on the outcome of an actor's behavior toward a recipient. These studies focused on interactions in which two agents are connected by an external goal (i.e., object-mediated social interaction) and revealed that the intent behind an action has a privileged role in evaluating the valence of a social interaction. The current study investigated whether the intent behind an action influences evaluation of contingent social interactions wherein one agent responds to another without referring to a specific target. To clarify this, we operationalized intent as harmful or harmless when one agent hit another (i.e., recipient), and manipulated the action's outcome by determining to what extent it changed the recipient's state (i.e., falling down or moving slightly). Results showed that in contingent interactions with both direct launching (i.e., the actor directly caused the change) and extended launching (i.e., the actor caused the change through a mediated block), when the action significantly affected the recipient, the agents were evaluated as having a more negative social interaction than when the influence was small; this effect was independent of the intent behind the action. Such findings demonstrated that evaluations of contingent social interactions are primarily influenced by an actor's causal role in the outcome, not the intent behind an action. This null effect of intent when evaluating social interaction contrasts with findings on object-mediated social interaction, which is consistent with human social evaluations relying on two dissociable systems: causal and intentional components.

Identifying Brain Networks at Multiple Time Scales via Deep Recurrent Neural Network

For decades, task functional magnetic resonance imaging has been a powerful noninvasive tool to explore the organizational architecture of human brain function. Researchers have developed a variety of brain network analysis methods for task fMRI data, including the general linear model, independent component analysis, and sparse representation methods. However, these shallow models are limited in faithful reconstruction and modeling of the hierarchical and temporal structures of brain networks, as demonstrated in more and more studies. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit great ability of modeling hierarchical and temporal dependence features in the machine learning field, which might be suitable for task fMRI data modeling. To explore such possible advantages of RNNs for task fMRI data, we propose a novel framework of a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) to model the functional brain networks from task fMRI data. Experimental results on the motor task fMRI data of Human Connectome Project 900 subjects release demonstrated that the proposed DRNN can not only faithfully reconstruct functional brain networks, but also identify more meaningful brain networks with multiple time scales which are overlooked by traditional shallow models. In general, this work provides an effective and powerful approach to identifying functional brain networks at multiple time scales from task fMRI data.

Understanding Body Language Does Not Require Matching the Body's Egocentric Map to Body Posture: A Brain Activation fMRI Study

Body language (BL) is a type of nonverbal communication in which the body communicates the message. We contrasted participants' cognitive processing of body representations or meanings versus body positions. Participants (N = 20) were shown pictures depicting body postures and were instructed to focus on their meaning (BL) or on the position of a body part relative to the position of another part (body structural description [BSD]). We examined activation in brain areas related to the two types of body representation-body schema and BSD-as modulated by the two tasks. We presumed that if understanding BL triggers embodiment of body posture, a matching procedure between the egocentric map coding the position of one's body segments in space and time should occur. We found that BL (vs. BSD) differentially activated the angular gyrus bilaterally, the anterior middle temporal gyrus, the temporal pole, and the right superior temporal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior medial gyrus, and the left superior frontal gyrus. BSD (vs. BL) differentially activated the superior parietal lobule (Area 7A) bilaterally, the posterior inferior temporal gyrus, the middle frontal gyrus, and the left precentral gyrus. Sensorimotor areas were differentially activated by BSD when compared with BL. Inclusive masking showed significant voxels in the superior colliculus and pulvinar, fusiform gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, the intraparietal sulcus bilaterally, inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, and precentral gyrus. These results indicate common brain networks for processing BL and BSD, for which some areas show differentially stronger or weaker processing of one task or the other, with the precuneus and the superior parietal lobule, the intraparietal sulcus, and sensorimotor areas most related to the BSD as activated by the BSD task. In contrast, the parietal operculum, an area related to the body schema, a representation crucial during embodiment of body postures, was not activated for implicit masking or for the differential contrasts.

"If you catch my drift...": ability to infer implied meaning is distinct from vocabulary and grammar skills

Background: Some individuals with autism find it challenging to use and understand language in conversation, despite having good abilities in core aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary. This suggests that pragmatic skills (such as understanding implied meanings in conversation) are separable from core language skills. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to demonstrate this dissociation in the general population. We propose that this may be because prior studies have used tasks in which different aspects of language are confounded.

Methods: The present study used novel language tasks and factor analysis to test whether pragmatic understanding of implied meaning, as part of a broader domain involving social understanding, is separable from core language skills. 120 adult participants were recruited online to complete a 7-task battery, including a test assessing comprehension of conversational implicature.

Results: In confirmatory analysis of a preregistered model, we compared whether the data showed better fit to a two-factor structure (including a “social understanding” and “core language” factor) or a simpler one-factor structure (comprising a general factor). The two-factor model showed significantly better fit.

Conclusions: This study supports the view that interpreting context-dependent conversational meaning is partially distinct from core language skills. This has implications for understanding the pragmatic language impairments reported in autism.

The Pragmatics of Pragmatic Language and the Curse of Ambiguity: An fMRI Study

In pragmatic language, there is an intentional distinction between the literal meaning of what is said, and what the speaker actually means. Previous neuroimaging investigations of pragmatic language have contrasted it with literal language; however, such contrasts may have been confounded by the higher levels of ambiguity in pragmatic language. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare pragmatic sentences (specifically requiring the interpretation of nonliteral meaning in the form of hints) with unintentionally ambiguous scenarios. Analysis showed that ambiguous language activated brain areas recognized to play a role in generating a theory of mind (ToM) that have previously been argued to support understanding of pragmatic language, specifically medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ). In contrast, the pragmatic scenarios drew on anterior temporal, superior parietal lobule, in addition to precuneus. While no effect of gender was found for unintentionally ambiguous stimuli, females showed greater activity than males within mPFC and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for pragmatic scenarios - regions thought to be involved in cognitive and affective empathy, respectively. Findings suggest that while areas underpinning ToM are sufficient to support meaning derivation in the context of ambiguity, reasoning about pragmatic intent is more reliant on access to self-referential memory.

Seeing minds in others: Mind perception modulates low-level social-cognitive performance and relates to ventromedial prefrontal structures

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is affected by whether they are believed to originate from an entity with a mind, capable of having internal states (i.e., mind perception). While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to social-cognitive processes like mind perception, the degree to which activation within this network relates to performance in subsequent social-cognitive tasks remains unclear. In the current study, participants performed a mind perception task (i.e., judging the likelihood that faces, varying in physical human-likeness, have internal states) while event-related fMRI was collected. Afterwards, participants performed a social attention task outside the scanner, during which they were cued by the gaze of the same faces that they previously judged within the mind perception task. Parametric analyses of the fMRI data revealed that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was related to both mind ratings inside the scanner and gaze-cueing performance outside the scanner. In addition, other social brain regions were related to gaze-cueing performance, including frontal areas like the left insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as temporal areas like the left temporo-parietal junction and bilateral temporal gyri. The findings suggest that functions subserved by the vmPFC are relevant to both mind perception and social attention, implicating a role of vmPFC in the top-down modulation of low-level social-cognitive processes.

Discovering common change-point patterns in functional connectivity across subjects

This paper studies change-points in human brain functional connectivity (FC) and seeks patterns that are common across multiple subjects under identical external stimulus. FC relates to the similarity of fMRI responses across different brain regions when the brain is simply resting or performing a task. While the dynamic nature of FC is well accepted, this paper develops a formal statistical test for finding change-points in times series associated with FC. It represents short-term connectivity by a symmetric positive-definite matrix, and uses a Riemannian metric on this space to develop a graphical method for detecting change-points in a time series of such matrices. It also provides a graphical representation of estimated FC for stationary subintervals in between the detected change-points. Furthermore, it uses a temporal alignment of the test statistic, viewed as a real-valued function over time, to remove inter-subject variability and to discover common change-point patterns across subjects. This method is illustrated using data from Human Connectome Project (HCP) database for multiple subjects and tasks.

"If you catch my drift...": ability to infer implied meaning is distinct from vocabulary and grammar skills

Background: Some individuals with autism find it challenging to use and understand language in conversation, despite having good abilities in core aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary. This suggests that pragmatic skills (such as understanding implied meanings in conversation) are separable from core language skills. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to demonstrate this dissociation in the general population. We propose that this may be because prior studies have used tasks in which different aspects of language are confounded. Methods: The present study used novel language tasks and factor analysis to test whether pragmatic understanding of implied meaning, as part of a broader domain involving social understanding, is separable from core language skills. 120 adult participants were recruited online to complete a 7-task battery, including a test assessing comprehension of conversational implicature. Results: In confirmatory analysis of a preregistered model, we compared whether the data showed better fit to a two-factor structure (including a "social understanding" and "core language" factor) or a simpler one-factor structure (comprising a general factor). The two-factor model showed significantly better fit. Conclusions: This study supports the view that interpreting context-dependent conversational meaning is partially distinct from core language skills. This has implications for understanding the pragmatic language impairments reported in autism.

Motivation and social-cognitive abilities in older adults: Convergent evidence from self-report measures and cardiovascular reactivity

Recently, some authors have suggested that age-related impairments in social-cognitive abilities-emotion recognition (ER) and theory of mind (ToM)-may be explained in terms of reduced motivation and effort mobilization in older adults. We examined performance on ER and ToM tasks, as well as corresponding control tasks, experimentally manipulating self-involvement. Sixty-one older adults and 57 young adults were randomly assigned to either a High or Low self-involvement condition. In the first condition, self-involvement was raised by telling participants were told that good task performance was associated with a number of positive, personally relevant social outcomes. Motivation was measured with both subjective (self-report questionnaire) and objective (systolic blood pressure reactivity-SBP-R) indices. Results showed that the self-involvement manipulation did not increase self-reported motivation, SBP-R, or task performance. Further correlation analyses focusing on individual differences in motivation did not reveal any association with performance, in either young or older adults. Notably, we found age-related decline in both ER and ToM, despite older adults having higher motivation than young adults. Overall, the present results were not consistent with previous claims that motivation affects older adults' social-cognitive performance, opening the route to potential alternative explanations.

A probabilistic atlas of the human motion complex built from large-scale functional localizer data

Accurate motion perception is critical to dealing with the changing dynamics of our visual world. A cluster known as the human MT+ complex (hMT+) has been identified as a core region involved in motion perception. Several atlases defined based on cytoarchitecture, retinotopy, connectivity, and multimodal features include homologs of the hMT+. However, an hMT+ atlas defined directly based on this region's response for motion is still lacking. Here, we identified the hMT+ based on motion responses from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) localizer data in 509 participants and then built a probabilistic atlas of the hMT+. As a result, four main findings were revealed. First, the hMT+ showed large interindividual variability across participants. Second, the atlases stabilized when the number of participants used to build the atlas was more than 100. Third, the functional hMT+ showed good agreement with the hMT+ atlases built based on cytoarchitecture, retinotopy, and connectivity, suggesting a good structural-functional correspondence. Fourth, tests on multiple fMRI data sets acquired from independent participants, imaging parameters and paradigms revealed that the functional hMT+ showed higher sensitivity than all other atlases in ROI analysis except that connectivity and multimodal hMT+ atlases in the left hemisphere could infrequently attain comparable sensitivity to the functional atlas. Taken together, our findings reveal the benefit of using large-scale functional localizer data to build a reliable and representative hMT+ atlas. Our atlas is freely available for download; it can be used to localize the hMT+ in individual participants when functional localizer data are not available.

Frontotemporal asymmetry in socioemotional behavior: A pilot study in frontotemporal dementia

Clinical studies report abnormal socioemotional behavior in patients with right frontotemporal disease, but neuroimaging studies of socioemotional behavior usually show bilateral activations in normal subjects. This discrepancy suggests that impaired interhemispheric collaboration for socioemotional functions results from asymmetric frontotemporal disease. Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) can clarify the contribution of direction-independent frontotemporal asymmetry. In a two-part study, we evaluated bvFTD patients using socioemotional scales and magnetic and resonance imaging measures. Part A compared 18 patients on scales of social dysfunction and emotional intelligence with degree of asymmetry in frontal lobe volumes and analyzed differences between lower and higher asymmetry groups. Part B compared 24 patients on scales of social observation and emotional blunting with degree of asymmetry in frontotemporal cortical thickness using multiple linear regression. Both results showed that left or right hemispheric-specific contributions did not account for all socioemotional differences and that frontal lobe and frontotemporal differences in atrophy between the hemispheres accounted for significant variance in abnormalities in social and emotional behavior. These preliminary results indicate that the degree of frontal lobe and frontotemporal asymmetric involvement, regardless of direction or laterality, significantly contribute to socioemotional dysfunction and support the hypothesis that interhemispheric collaboration is important for complex socioemotional behavior.

The functional database of the ARCHI project: Potential and perspectives

More than two decades of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain have succeeded to identify, with a growing level of precision, the neural basis of multiple cognitive skills within various domains (perception, sensorimotor processes, language, emotion and social cognition …). Progress has been made in the comprehension of the functional organization of localized brain areas. However, the long time required for fMRI acquisition limits the number of experimental conditions performed in a single individual. As a consequence, distinct brain localizations have mostly been studied in separate groups of participants, and their functional relationships at the individual level remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we report here preliminary results on a database of fMRI data acquired on 78 individuals who each performed a total of 29 experimental conditions, grouped in 4 cross-domains functional localizers. This protocol has been designed to efficiently isolate, in a single session, the brain activity associated with language, numerical representation, social perception and reasoning, premotor and visuomotor representations. Analyses are reported at the group and at the individual level, to establish the ability of our protocol to selectively capture distinct regions of interest in a very short time. Test-retest reliability was assessed in a subset of participants. The activity evoked by the different contrasts of the protocol is located in distinct brain networks that, individually, largely replicate previous findings and, taken together, cover a large proportion of the cortical surface. We provide detailed analyses of a subset of regions of relevance: the left frontal, left temporal and middle frontal cortices. These preliminary analyses highlight how combining such a large set of functional contrasts may contribute to establish a finer-grained brain atlas of cognitive functions, especially in regions of high functional overlap. Detailed structural images (structural connectivity, micro-structures, axonal diameter) acquired in the same individuals in the context of the ARCHI database provide a promising situation to explore functional/structural interdependence. Additionally, this protocol might also be used as a way to establish individual neurofunctional signatures in large cohorts.

Perceiving animacy purely from visual motion cues involves intraparietal sulcus

Distinguishing animate from inanimate objects is fundamental for social perception in humans and animals. Visual motion cues indicative of self-propelled object motion are useful for animacy perception: they can be detected over a wide expanse of visual field, at distance and in low visibility conditions, can attract attention and provide clues about object behaviour. However, the neural correlates of animacy perception evoked exclusively by visual motion cues, i.e. not relying on form, background or visual context, are unclear. We aimed to address this question in four psychophysical experiments in humans, two of which performed during neuroimaging. The stimulus was a single dot with constant form that moved on a blank background and evoked controlled degrees of perceived animacy through parametric variations of self-propelled motion cues. BOLD signals reflecting perceived animacy in a graded manner irrespective of eye movements were found in one intraparietal region. Additional whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses revealed no comparable effects in brain regions associated with social processing or other areas. Our study shows that animacy perception evoked solely by visual motion cues, a basic perceptual process in social cognition, engages brain regions not primarily associated with social cognition.

"If you catch my drift...": ability to infer implied meaning is distinct from vocabulary and grammar skills

Background: Some individuals with autism find it challenging to use and understand language in conversation, despite having good abilities in core aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary. This suggests that pragmatic skills (such as understanding implied meanings in conversation) are separable from core language skills. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to demonstrate this dissociation in the general population. We propose that this may be because prior studies have used tasks in which different aspects of language are confounded. Methods: The present study used novel language tasks and factor analysis to test whether pragmatic language skills are separable from core language skills. 120 adult participants were recruited online to complete a 7-task battery, including a test assessing comprehension of conversational implicature. Results: In confirmatory analysis of a preregistered model, we compared whether the data showed better fit to a two-factor structure (including a pragmatic conversation comprehension and core language factor) or a simpler one-factor structure (comprising a general language factor). The two-factor model showed significantly better fit. Conclusions: This study supports the view that interpreting context-dependent conversational meaning is partially distinct from core language skill. This has implications for understanding the pragmatic language impairments reported in autism.

Electroconvulsive therapy "corrects" the neural architecture of visuospatial memory: Implications for typical cognitive-affective functioning

Although electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a widely used and effective treatment for refractory depression, the neural underpinnings of its therapeutic effects remain poorly understood. To address this issue, here, we focused on a core cognitive deficit associated with depression, which tends to be reliably ameliorated through ECT, specifically, the ability to learn visuospatial information. Thus, we pursued three goals. First, we tested whether ECT can “normalize” the functional brain organization patterns associated with visuospatial memory and whether such corrections would predict post-ECT improvements in learning visuospatial information. Second, we investigated whether, among healthy individuals, stronger expression of the neural pattern, susceptible to adjustments through ECT, would predict reduced incidence of depression-relevant cognition and affect. Third, we sought to quantify the heritability of the ECT-correctable neural profile. Thus, in a task fMRI study with a clinical and a healthy comparison sample, we characterized two functional connectome patterns: one that typifies trait depression (i.e., differentiates patients from healthy individuals) and another that is susceptible to “normalization” through ECT. Both before and after ECT, greater expression of the trait depression neural profile was associated with more frequent repetitive thinking about past personal events (affective persistence), a hallmark of depressogenic cognition. Complementarily, post-treatment, stronger expression of the ECT-corrected neural profile was linked to improvements in visuospatial learning, a mental ability which is markedly impaired in depression. Subsequently, using data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) (N = 333), we demonstrated that the functional brain organization of healthy participants with greater levels of subclinical depression and higher incidence of its associated cognitive deficits (affective persistence, impaired learning) shows greater similarity to the trait depression neural profile and reduced similarity to the ECT-correctable neural profile, as identified in the patient sample. These results tended to be specific to learning-relevant task contexts (working memory, perceptual relational processing). Genetic analyses based on HCP twin data (N = 128 pairs) suggested that, among healthy individuals, a functional brain organization similar to the one normalized by ECT in the patient sample is endogenous to cognitive contexts that require visuospatial processing that extends beyond the here-and-now. Broadly, the present findings supported our hypothesis that some of the therapeutic effects of ECT may be due to its correcting the expression of a naturally occurring pattern of functional brain organization that facilitates integration of internal and external cognition beyond the immediate present. Given their substantial susceptibility to both genetic and environmental effects, such mechanisms may be useful both for identifying at risk individuals and for monitoring progress of interventions targeting mood-related pathology.

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Trait depression and ECT-correctable neural profiles were described in patients.

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The former was related to rumination and the latter to improved learning after ECT.

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Their relative expression was linked to subclinical depression in a healthy sample.

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Twin analyses implied that both profiles are endogenous to working memory contexts.