Summary: A new investigation reveals that the brain region often linked to the understanding of others, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), is more activated by uncertainty than only by social reasoning. Using FMRI, the researchers found that DMPFC responded to uncertain inferences about people, bodies and even objects.
This challenges the idea that the region is uniquely tuned to social cognition. The findings could help explain atypical social behaviors in conditions such as autism, reformulating them as differences in the management of uncertainty.
Key facts:
DMPFC and uncertainty: DMPFC responds to uncertainty regardless of whether inference involves people, bodies or objects. Author’s implications: The results suggest that atypical social cognition can come from differences in coping with uncertainty.
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Imagine that you are about to face a friend for a hurtful comment he did and you are trying to predict his answer. Depending on what you know about your friend, you can infer that she will understand where she comes and apologizes, defensively or responds with a criticism of you.
This process of trying to predict the beliefs, intentions and emotions of other people is known as mentalization, and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) is one of the key brain regions that make up what is known as the “mentalization network.”
Studies have shown that the network is more committed during mentalization than when people do other types of inferences, such as objects, such as the comfort of a chair or human physical features.
But the new research of psychologists of the University of Pennsylvania defies the interpretation of these findings by highlighting a confusing variable in the activation of DMPFC: uncertainty.
They discovered that the region was committed not only when people tried to solve uncertainty to form evaluations about what others thought and feeling, but also when they faced uncertainty about objects and human physical features.
His study, one of the few to directly examine the relations between uncertainty and social cognition, is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“Our work points to uncertainty as an important factor that could help explain the differences in how people think and behave in social contexts compared to notial contexts,” says the main author Adrianna (Anna) Jenkins, associate professor of psychology at the School of Arts and Sciences.
She and the Postdoctoral Researcher Berkay, the first author of the document, keep in mind that DMPFC activation seems to be driven by uncertainty, which is often high in social contexts, so previous research indicates that activation is greater due to the social context.
Their findings come from scanning the brain of 46 participants using functional magnetic resonance images (FMRI), since they made inferences about mental domain and two non -mental domains: human minds, human bodies and physical objects.
To determine if the brain activity is driven by differences in the domain or by the differences in the level of uncertainty, the researchers varied the level of uncertainty in each of the three conditions, explains Berkay.
To measure the levels of uncertainty, they conducted an online pilot study before the FMRI scan in which they asked the participants to qualify from 1 to 100 how information is one characteristic for their evaluation of another.
Then, during the FMRI scan, the participants were asked how likely a characteristic describe the same personality, human body or furniture as another. For example, given that a person is compassionate, how likely it is sincere? Knowing that a person is redhead, how likely they are short? They discovered that uncertainty was associated with the activation of DMPFC in the three categories.
Its findings open paths for a better understanding of conditions with atypical mentalization, such as autistic spectrum disorder and social anxiety. Berkay points out that autism is associated with atypical mentalization despite the typical performance in non -concuial tasks, and is also associated with higher levels of uncertainty intolerance.
“Our findings provide a unifying frame to understand these apparently separated findings by suggesting that the atypical performance we observe in autistic people during mental tasks could be due to differences in the responses to uncertainty or strategies to reduce uncertainty and, therefore, has implications for possible interventions that can be fruitful,” says Berkay.
Jenkins adds: “This is one of the future instructions on which we are more excited. We are especially curious to see if it is possible to obtain a new traction to understand autism and other ‘social’ conditions through the reconceptualization of aspects of atypical social cognition as cognition of atypical uncertainty.”
This study focused on uncertainty about people and objects, but Jenkins and Berkay point out that the question of Si DMPFC plays a role in reducing uncertainty about other things is one for future experiments.
Looking towards the future, researchers are working to characterize different types of uncertainty, such as reducible and irreducible uncertainty, which includes how they relate to activation and disorders of the social function of DMPFC.
Other future directorates for research include characterizing how different people process uncertainty, understanding whether certain types of uncertainty are especially frequent in people’s lives and distinguishing the strategies that people use to reduce uncertainty in social and north contexts.
Adrianna (ANNA) Jenkins is an associated professor of Psychology at the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dila Berkay is a postdoctoral fellow in Jenkins’ laboratory in Penn Arts & Sciences.
Financing: This research is supported by the University of the University of Pennsylvania.
On this research news of social neuroscience
Author: Dila Berkay
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Contact: Dila Berkay – University of Pennsylvania
Image: The image is accredited to Neuroscience News
Original research: closed access.
“Uncertainty, not mental content, drives the dorsomedial prefrontal commitment during the inferences about the others” by Dila Berkay et al. Neuroscience Magazine
Abstract
Uncertainty, not mental content, boosts dorsomedial prefrontal commitment during inferences about others
To navigate in social life, humans make inferences about the intentions, beliefs, emotions and personalities of other people, that is, they are mentalized.
A network of brain regions constantly involves more during mentalization than during carefully controlled comparison tasks, sometimes cited as evidence of specific domain mentalization processes.
Here we investigate the possibility that the commitment of these regions during mentalization may be due to uncertainty.
We scan 46 participants (33 women, 13 men) using FMRI, since they made mental and non -mental inferences (about human minds, human bodies and physical objects) under different levels of uncertainty.
Uncertainty explained activation in a key region of the mentalization network: the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC).
Greater uncertainty was associated with a greater participation of DMPFC in all conditions and, by controlling uncertainty, the participation of DMPFC did not differentiate the mental inferences from non -mental.
The results suggest that apparently selective DMPFC’s commitment during social inference can be better understood as an answer to uncertainty, which often rises in social contexts, with implications for cognitive architecture of the social brain and social function disorders.
