The neural correlates of passively viewed sequences of true and false beliefs. Geangu, E., Gibson, A., Kaduk, K., & Reid, V. M. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 8(4):432–437, 2013.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
The ability to infer other people's mental states such as desires, emotions, intentions and beliefs is essential for successful social interactions, and it is usually referred to as theory of mind (ToM). In particular, the ability to detect and understand that people have beliefs about reality that may be false is considered an important hallmark of ToM. This experiment reports on the results of 18 participants who viewed photographic sequences of an actress performing actions as a consequence of true and false beliefs. Consistent with prior work, results from the passive viewing of stimuli depicting true belief indicated an increased response over frontal, central and parietal regions when compared with the amplitude for the false belief condition. These results show that (i) frontal activity is required for processing false belief tasks and (ii) parietal effects reported in previous studies to reflect specific cognitive process of monitoring others' beliefs can be elicited in the absence of an explicit instruction for mentalizing.
@Article{Geangu2013,
  author      = {Geangu, Elena and Gibson, Aimee and Kaduk, Katharina and Reid, Vincent M.},
  journal     = {Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci},
  title       = {The neural correlates of passively viewed sequences of true and false beliefs.},
  year        = {2013},
  number      = {4},
  pages       = {432--437},
  volume      = {8},
  abstract    = {The ability to infer other people's mental states such as desires,
	emotions, intentions and beliefs is essential for successful social
	interactions, and it is usually referred to as theory of mind (ToM).
	In particular, the ability to detect and understand that people have
	beliefs about reality that may be false is considered an important
	hallmark of ToM. This experiment reports on the results of 18 participants
	who viewed photographic sequences of an actress performing actions
	as a consequence of true and false beliefs. Consistent with prior
	work, results from the passive viewing of stimuli depicting true
	belief indicated an increased response over frontal, central and
	parietal regions when compared with the amplitude for the false belief
	condition. These results show that (i) frontal activity is required
	for processing false belief tasks and (ii) parietal effects reported
	in previous studies to reflect specific cognitive process of monitoring
	others' beliefs can be elicited in the absence of an explicit instruction
	for mentalizing.},
  doi         = {10.1093/scan/nss015},
  keywords    = {Adolescent; Adult; Brain, physiology; Cognition, physiology; Concept Formation, physiology; Culture; Emotions, physiology; Female; Humans; Male; Mental Processes, physiology; Reality Testing; Theory of Mind, physiology; Young Adult},
  language    = {eng},
  medline-pst = {ppublish},
  pmid        = {22317745},
  school      = {University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell Ateneo Nuovo, 1 Milano 20126, Italy. elena.geangu@unimib.it},
  timestamp   = {2014.11.18},
}

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