ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Theory of Mind and the brain substrates of direct and indirect communicative action understanding.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Physical and Mental Metaphors (PMM) task and its validation in schizophrenia: A tool for rapid assessment of figurative language comprehension, between pragmatics and symptoms.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Neuropragmatics: from classical pragmatics to neurocognitive models of pragmatics in dialogue.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- How Quotation Types Shape Classic Novel Reading in Chinese: A Comparison Between Human Eye-Movements and Large Language Models.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind.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
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.
Funding
Abstract
Grasping the speaker's communicative intention based on the verbal utterance and its context is one of the key aspects of human interaction. This ability relies on theory of mind (ToM), that is, the cognitive processing of mental states, beliefs and desires of others. We review evidence showing that brain regions ypically engaged in ToM processing, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral temporo-parietal junction, are activated when listeners interpret indirect speech acts. However, other studies show a degree of variability of these 'ToM area activations' during indirect communication, while yet others demonstrate that the same areas are activated for specific communicative functions, such as requests, promises or questions
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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.