Understanding the intentions behind man-made products elicits neural activity in areas dedicated to mental state attribution.

Trying to understand others is the most pervasive aspect of successful social interaction. To date there is no evidence on whether human products, which signal the workings of a mind in the absence of an explicit agent, also reliably engage neural structures typically associated with mental state attribution. By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging the present study shows that when subjects believe they are listening to a piece of music that was written by a composer (i.e., human product) as opposed to generated by a computer (i.e., nonhuman product), activations in the cortical network typically reported for mental state attribution (anterior medial frontal cortex [aMFC]), superior temporal sulcus, and temporal poles) were observed. The activation in the aMFC correlated highly with the extent to which subjects had engaged in attributing the expression of intentions to the composed pieces, as indicated in a postimaging questionnaire. We interpret these findings as indicative of automatic mechanisms, which reflect mental state attribution in the face of any stimulus that potentially signals the working of another mind and conclude that even in the absence of a socially salient stimulus, our environment is still populated by the indirect social signals inherent to human artifacts.

[1]  M. Torrens Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268 , 1990 .

[2]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of “theory of mind” in story comprehension , 1995, Cognition.

[3]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Analysis of fMRI Time-Series Revisited—Again , 1995, NeuroImage.

[4]  M. Hallett,et al.  Modeling other minds , 1995, Neuroreport.

[5]  C. Frith,et al.  Movement and Mind: A Functional Imaging Study of Perception and Interpretation of Complex Intentional Movement Patterns , 2000, NeuroImage.

[6]  T. Allison,et al.  Social perception from visual cues: role of the STS region , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[7]  C. Frith,et al.  Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study of ‘theory of mind’ in verbal and nonverbal tasks , 2000, Neuropsychologia.

[8]  G Lohmann,et al.  LIPSIA--a new software system for the evaluation of functional magnetic resonance images of the human brain. , 2001, Computerized medical imaging and graphics : the official journal of the Computerized Medical Imaging Society.

[9]  Daniel Houser,et al.  A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[10]  K. Zilles,et al.  Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Theory of Mind and Self-Perspective , 2001, NeuroImage.

[11]  Evelyn C. Ferstl,et al.  What Does the Frontomedian Cortex Contribute to Language Processing: Coherence or Theory of Mind? , 2002, NeuroImage.

[12]  Christopher D. Frith,et al.  Imaging the Intentional Stance in a Competitive Game , 2002, NeuroImage.

[13]  C. Frith,et al.  “Hey John”: Signals Conveying Communicative Intention toward the Self Activate Brain Regions Associated with “Mentalizing,” Regardless of Modality , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[14]  C. Frith,et al.  Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. , 2003, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[15]  C. Frith,et al.  Functional imaging of ‘theory of mind’ , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[16]  Henrik Walter,et al.  Understanding Intentions in Social Interaction: The Role of the Anterior Paracingulate Cortex , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[17]  R. Passingham,et al.  Brain Mechanisms for Inferring Deceit in the Actions of Others , 2004, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[18]  R. Miall,et al.  A system in the human brain for predicting the actions of others , 2004, Nature Neuroscience.

[19]  R. Dolan,et al.  Brain Responses to the Acquired Moral Status of Faces , 2004, Neuron.

[20]  C. Frith,et al.  Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition , 2006, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[21]  Istvan Molnar-Szakacs,et al.  Music and mirror neurons: from motion to 'e'motion. , 2006, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[22]  R. Saxe Uniquely human social cognition , 2006, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[23]  Jordan Grafman,et al.  Social concepts are represented in the superior anterior temporal cortex , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[24]  V. Gallese,et al.  Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  Scott T. Grafton,et al.  Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought , 2007, Science.