Humans powerfully and flexibly interpret the behaviour of other people based on an understanding of their minds: that is, we use a “theory of mind.” In this study we distinguish theory of mind, which represents another person’s mental states, from a representation of the simple presence of another person per se. The studies reported here establish for the first time that a region in the human temporoparietal junction (here called the TPJ-M) is involved specifically in reasoning about the contents of another person’s mind. First, the TPJ-M was doubly dissociated from the nearby extrastriate body area (EBA; Downing et al., 2001). Second, the TPJ-M does not respond to false representations in nonsocial control stories. Third, the BOLD response in the TPJ-M bilaterally was higher when subjects read stories about a character’s mental states, compared with stories that described people in physical detail, which did not differ from stories about nonhuman objects. Thus, the role of the TPJ-M in understanding other people appears to be specific to reasoning about the content of mental states.
CITATION STYLE
Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2013). People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind.” In Social Neuroscience: Key Readings (pp. 171–182). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203496190
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.