K. D. Kandylaki 1,2 , A. Nagels 1 , R. Wiese 2 , I. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky 2,3 , T. Kircher 1 kandylak@med.uni-marburg.de Processing theory of mind in natural language contexts: an efMRI study 1 Clinic for Psychiatry und Psychotherapy, University of Marburg, Rudolf-Bultmann-Str. 8, 35039 Marburg, Germany 2 Department for Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Deutschhausstrasse 3, 35037 Marburg, Germany 3 School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide 5001, Australia [1] Aichhorn, M., Perner, J., Weiss, B., Kronbichler, M., Staffen, W., & Ladurner, G. (2009). Temporo-parietal junction activity in theory-of-mind tasks: falseness, beliefs, or attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(6), 1179-1192. [2] Fletcher, P. C., Happé, F., Frith, U., Baker, S. C., Dolan, R. J., Frackowiak, R. S., & Frith, C. D. (1995). Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of “theory of mind” in story comprehension. 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People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in theory of mind. NeuroImage, 19 (4), 1835–1842. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00230-1 [8] Spengler, S., Cramon, D. Y. von, & Brass, M. (2009). Control of shared representations relies on key processes involved in mental state attribution. Human Brain Mapping, 30 (11), 3704–18. doi:10.1002/hbm.20800 [9] Rilling, J. K., Sanfey, A. G., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2004). The neural correlates of theory of mind within interpersonal interactions. Neuroimage, 22(4), 1694-1703. Stimuli. We created 20 two-minute long stories. We pre-tested the stimuli in an online questionnaire for naturalness and comprehensibility and found no significant differences in the ratings for TOM and NONTOM passages ( p >.5). Presentation of conditions was counterbalanced across participants. Hintergrund Background Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. The neural correlates of ToM have typically been investigated in visually presented vignettes of images, cartoons or text [1, 2, 3]. In the present fMRI study, we introduce a more naturalistic setup: our ToM conditions are embedded within longer stories. We targeted ToM comprehension indirectly , during story comprehension and directly, in question answering after the story. Example story (approximate English translation) [...] but his wife was so busy taking pictures of the idyllic landscape, so she didn't realize, that her husband ate all the sandwiches. When later they arrived at Brocken, she also wanted to eat a sandwich, but found only drinks in her bag. She thought that maybe she had forgotten the food in the car. [TOM] [...] The man took the camera from his backpack and gave it to the hiker. The hiker put a lot of effort and took a whole series of pictures from all different perspectives. [NONTOM] The couple thanked him and went on walking. Participants. We measured twenty monolingual native speakers of German, all right-handed (Edinburgh Inventory of Handedness) (age mean = 24.3 years, sd = 2.1 years, male N = 6). Ergebnisse Hintergrund Results Procedure. In the fMRI-session participants were instructed to listen carefully to 20 stories while fixating a point in the middle of the screen (story) and to answer two questions after each story (task). One such trial developed as follows: “An old couple from Göttingen … piston engine from the 60s.” (the whole story) Theory of Mind (ToM) in naturalistic stories recruits classical ToM processing regions (SMG, aCC, pCC, MFG) as well as the hippocampus. SMG activation: comparable to temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) activation found in several studies on ToM [ 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Hippocampal activation is explained through processing of interpersonal interactions between characters as found in [9]. Our results show for the first time that ToM regions (e.g. SMG, sMFG) are activated while listening to stories in a natural setting. Explicit ToM-related decision-making leads to recruitment of frontal task-relevant regions (e.g. aCC, MOrbG). + Despite the same behavioral performance on TOM vs. NONTOM questions, we found differences in the BOLD responses as shown: TOM vs. NONTOM - Story Hinter Anatomical region hem MNI Coordinates T Cluster size in voxels Anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) l -4 22 28 3.28 141 Posterior cingulate cortex (pCC) l -2 -28 30 3.04 156 Superior middle frontal gyrus (sMFG) l -16 52 0 3.19 277 Hippocampus (HIP) l -12 -38 8 3.88 957 Hippocampus (HIP) r 30 -42 2 3.24 103 Putamen (PUT) l -28 -12 6 3.39 139 Supramarginal gyrus (SMG) r 50 -24 30 3.22 217 Supramarginal gyrus (SMG) l -54 -26 28 3.45 129 Cerebellum (Cbl) r 36 -54 -28 3.28 246 Cerebellar vermis (CblVer) 2 -58 -4 3.41 170 Anatomical region hem MNI Coordinates T Cluster size in voxels Anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) r 8 38 8 3.37 101 Middle orbital gyrus (MOrbG) r 2 54 -12 3.40 82 Middle occipital gyrus (MOccG) r 42 -70 24 3.17 75 TOM vs. NONTOM - Task a. b. SMG aCC aCC pCC MOrbG Figure: The contrast TOM vs. NONTOM is marked in red for story and in yellow for task. In blue the conjunction. Cluster volume > 72 voxels (Monte Carlo corr.), individual voxel threshold of p <.005.) c. d. sMFG MOccG HIP PUT Ergebnisse Hintergrund Introduction Ergebnisse Hintergrund Discussion and Conclusion Ergebnisse Hintergrund Methods approx. 2 min Where did the woman think that the sandwiches were? 5sec a. In the car b. In her husband's stomach Where did the woman think that the sandwiches were? 3sec Who had the camera when a series of pictures was taken? 5sec a. The hiker b. The old man Who had the camera when a series of pictures was taken? 3sec Time e.