Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27683425›Full record

ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017

Brain activation for spontaneous and explicit false belief tasks overlaps: new fMRI evidence on belief processing and violation of expectation.

Lara Bardi, Charlotte Desmet, Annabel Nijhof, Jan R Wiersema, Marcel Brass

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Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

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0cells of the map it votes in
26citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from 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.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025
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  16. Two systems for thinking about others' thoughts in the developing brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020
    Article
  17. Article
  18. Article
  19. Article
  20. The neural representation of mental beliefs held by two agents.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2019
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Lara BardiDepartment of Experimental Psychology.
Charlotte DesmetDepartment of Experimental Psychology.
Annabel NijhofDepartment of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Jan R WiersemaDepartment of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Marcel BrassDepartment of Experimental Psychology.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

There is extensive discussion on whether spontaneous and explicit forms of ToM are based on the same cognitive/neural mechanisms or rather reflect qualitatively different processes. For the first time, we analyzed the BOLD signal for false belief processing by directly comparing spontaneous and explicit ToM task versions. In both versions, participants watched videos of a scene including an agent who acquires a true or false belief about the location of an object (belief formation phase). At the end of the movies (outcome phase), participants had to react to the presence of the object. During the belief formation phase, greater activity was found for false vs true belief trials in the right posterior parietal cortex. The ROI analysis of the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), confirmed this observation. Moreover, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) was active during the outcome phase, being sensitive to violation of both the participant's and agent's expectations about the location of the object. Activity in the TPJ and aMPFC was not modulated by the spontaneous/explicit task. Overall, these data show that neural mechanisms for spontaneous and explicit ToM overlap. Interestingly, a dissociation between TPJ and aMPFC for belief tracking and outcome evaluation, respectively, was also found.

Indexed as

Set, PsychologyAdultAttentionBrain MappingDominance, CerebralFemaleForm PerceptionHumansMagnetic Resonance ImagingMaleMotion PerceptionOrientationOxygen ConsumptionParietal LobePrefrontal CortexProbabilityfalse belieffMRIspontaneous theory of mind

Identifiers

PMID27683425
PMCPMC5499811

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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.