ArticleHuman brain mapping2018
Affective and cooperative social interactions modulate effective connectivity within and between the mirror and mentalizing systems.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Relational vs representational social cognitive processing: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Neural representation of social concepts: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Brain imaging and behavior · 2021Pooled it
- Social cognition in the blind brain: A coordinate-based meta-analysis.Human brain mapping · 2021Pooled it
- Is the Putative Mirror Neuron System Associated with Empathy? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neuropsychology review · 2021Pooled it
- Neural processing of social interaction: Coordinate-based meta-analytic evidence from human neuroimaging studies.Human brain mapping · 2019Pooled it
- Human Mentalizing as Rational Probabilistic Inference.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Resting-State Functional Interactions Between the Action Observation Network and the Mentalizing System.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Spatio-temporal activity of brain electrical sources during processing of abstract social concepts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The neurostructural bases of empathy: morphometric evidence for a multicomponential approach.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Three-stage Dynamic Brain-cognitive Model of Understanding Action Intention Displayed by Human Body Movements.Brain topography · 2024Review
- The widespread action observation/execution matching system for facial expression processing.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Mind your step: social cerebellum in interactive navigation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Distinct neural couplings to shared goal and action coordination in joint action: evidence based on fNIRS hyperscanning.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Effective connectivity and criminal sentencing decisions: dynamic causal models in laypersons and legal experts.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Effective connectivity of the human mirror neuron system during social cognition.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Functional connectivity associated with individual differences on the emotional attentional blink task.Neuroimage. Reports · 2021Article
- Photographs of Actions: What Makes Them Special Cues to Social Perception.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- The Precuneus Contributes to Embodied Scene Construction for Singing in an Opera.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Finding the neural correlates of collaboration using a three-person fMRI hyperscanning paradigm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Social Perception and Interaction Database-A Novel Tool to Study Social Cognitive Processes With Point-Light Displays.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Decoding the meaning of others' actions, a crucial step for social cognition, involves different neural mechanisms. While the "mirror" and "mentalizing" systems have been associated with, respectively, the processing of biological actions versus more abstract information, their respective contribution to intention understanding is debated. Processing social interactions seems to recruit both neural systems, with a different weight depending on cues emphasizing either shared action goals or shared mental states. We have previously shown that observing cooperative and affective social interactions elicits stronger activity in key nodes of, respectively, the mirror (left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), superior parietal cortex (SPL), and ventral/dorsal premotor cortex (vPMC/dPMC)) and mentalizing (ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)) systems. To unveil their causal organization, we investigated the effective connectivity underlying the observation of human social interactions expressing increasing cooperativity (involving left pSTS, SPL, and vPMC) versus affectivity (vmPFC) via dynamic causal modeling in 36 healthy human subjects. We found strong evidence for a model including the pSTS and vPMC as input nodes for the observed interactions. The extrinsic connectivity of this model undergoes oppositely valenced modulations, with cooperativity promoting positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and both SPL (forward) and vPMC (mainly backward), and affectivity promoting reciprocal positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and vmPFC (mainly backward). Alongside fMRI data, such divergent effective connectivity suggests that different dimensions underlying the processing of social interactions recruit distinct, although strongly interconnected, neural pathways associated with, respectively, the bottom-up visuomotor processing of motor intentions, and the top-down attribution of affective/mental states.
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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.