Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Clinical Trial
. 2003 Jun 15;23(12):5258-63.
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.23-12-05258.2003.

"Hey John": signals conveying communicative intention toward the self activate brain regions associated with "mentalizing," regardless of modality

Knut K W Kampe  1 , Chris D Frith, Uta Frith
Affiliations
Clinical Trial

"Hey John": signals conveying communicative intention toward the self activate brain regions associated with "mentalizing," regardless of modality

Knut K W Kampe et al. J Neurosci. .

Abstract

Successful communication between two people depends first on the recognition of the intention to communicate. Such intentions may be conveyed by signals directed at the self, such as calling a person's name or making eye contact. In this study we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the perception of these two signals, which differ in modality and sensory channel, activate common brain regions: the paracingulate cortex and temporal poles bilaterally. These regions are part of a network that has been consistently activated when people are asked to think about the mental states of others. Activation of this network is independent of arousal as measured by changes in pupil diameter.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example of stimuli. Subjects were shown color images of faces that either looked straight at the subjects (eye-contact condition) or away to either side (averted gaze) (A). The faces were counterbalanced for gender, head position, and, for non-eye-contact images, gaze direction (right or left). Half of the faces had the gaze directed at the subjects and half away to the side. B, Random examples of scrambled images derived from the stimuli above. These were presented before and after each stimulus face to avoid changes in pupil diameter attributable to luminance changes.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Areas activated by signals conveying communicative intention. For illustrative purposes the activations of three different analyses are included in one image but are coded with different colors. “Direct eye gaze compared with averted eye gaze” activated the paracingulate cortex (A, white arrows) and the temporal pole (B, black arrows). The activation map is coded in yellow. Activation in these two areas was predicted based on previous studies involving mentalizing. Calling the subject's own first name compared with a different name also activated these regions. The activation map is coded in blue. Areas activated across both analyses (e.g., the conjunction of both activations) are shown in green. The activation map is superimposed on a template of 152 averaged T1 images. The image shows voxels that surpass the threshold of p = 0.001 in one of the individual contrasts (yellow, blue), or across both studies (green). The gray arrow depicts an area in the superior frontal gyrus activated only by voices, p = 0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons (see Results).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Pupil diameter as measure of arousal. Arousal was monitored by measuring pupil diameter while subjects viewed the images of faces (A) or heard voice recordings (B) in the scanner. There was a task-related increase in pupil diameter when subjects detected target stimuli to which they had to respond (solid gray line in both A and B). When no stimulus appeared there was no change in pupil diameter (dotted gray line). When visual stimuli were presented to which the subjects did not have to respond (eye gaze directed at the subject or eye gaze averted to one side) pupil diameter decreased. Hearing a name moderately increased pupil diameter, but there was no difference in arousal when the subject's own name (solid black line) or a different name was called (dotted black line). The black bar indicates onset and duration (1.2 sec) of the stimuli.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Ashburner J, Friston K ( 1997) Multimodal image coregistration and partitioning: a unified framework. NeuroImage 6: 209–217. - PubMed
    1. Baron-Cohen S, Leslie AM, Frith U ( 1985) Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition 21: 37–46. - PubMed
    1. Baron-Cohen S, Ring HA, Wheelwright S, Bullmore ET, Brammer MJ, Simmons A, Williams SC ( 1999) Social intelligence in the normal and autistic brain: an fMRI study. Eur J Neurosci 11: 1891–1898. - PubMed
    1. Baron-Cohen S, Tager-Flusberg H, Cohen DJ ( 2000) Understanding other minds: perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience. New York: Oxford UP.
    1. Bloom P ( 2000) How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources