ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2016
Neuronal interactions between mentalising and action systems during indirect request processing.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Non-literal language processing is jointly supported by the language and theory of mind networks: Evidence from a novel meta-analytic fMRI approach.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Pooled it
- Neuropragmatics: from classical pragmatics to neurocognitive models of pragmatics in dialogue.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Pragmatics partially segregated from Theory of Mind: evidence from resting-state functional connectivity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Theory of Mind and the brain substrates of direct and indirect communicative action understanding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Resting-State Functional Interactions Between the Action Observation Network and the Mentalizing System.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Understanding implicature as an inner simulation of the speaker's context retrieval.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Travelling beyond time: shared brain system for self-projection in the temporal, political and moral domains.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Does the right temporo-parietal junction play a role in processing indirect speech acts? A transcranial magnetic stimulation study.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- Individual Differences in Emotion Attenuation Brought by Indirect Replies Is Related to Resting-State Brain Activity.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts.Brain and language · 2023Review
- Instantaneous neural processing of communicative functions conveyed by speech prosody.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Resting functional connectivity of the left inferior frontal gyrus with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction reflects the social network size for active interactions.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Individual Differences in Indirect Speech Act Processing Found Outside the Language Network.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Article
- The Social Connectome - Moving Toward Complexity in the Study of Brain Networks and Their Interactions in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
- Neurophysiological evidence for rapid processing of verbal and gestural information in understanding communicative actions.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Posterior cingulate cortex can be a regulatory modulator of the default mode network in task-negative state.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Oscillatory brain activity differentially reflects false belief understanding and complementation syntax processing.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
- Neural systems for evaluating speaker (Un)believability.Human brain mapping · 2017Article
- Altered Neural Activity during Irony Comprehension in Unaffected First-Degree Relatives of Schizophrenia Patients-An fMRI Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human communication relies on the ability to process linguistic structure and to map words and utterances onto our environment. Furthermore, as what we communicate is often not directly encoded in our language (e.g. in the case of irony, jokes or indirect requests), we need to extract additional cues to infer the beliefs and desires of our conversational partners. Although the functional interplay between language and the ability to mentalise has been discussed in theoretical accounts in the past, the neurobiological underpinnings of these dynamics are currently not well understood. Here, we address this issue using functional imaging (fMRI). Participants listened to question-reply dialogues. In these dialogues, a reply is interpreted as a direct reply, an indirect reply or a request for action, depending on the question. We show that inferring meaning from indirect replies engages parts of the mentalising network (mPFC) while requests for action also activate the cortical motor system (IPL). Subsequent connectivity analysis using Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) revealed that this pattern of activation is best explained by an increase in effective connectivity from the mentalising network (mPFC) to the action system (IPL). These results are an important step towards a more integrative understanding of the neurobiological basis of indirect speech processing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.