Immediately before each of these self-reflections, participants performed one of three different types of judgments: ( i) an initial self-reflection ( ii) a judgment of the opinions/preferences of a person manipulated to be perceived as similar to self or ( iii) a judgment of the opinions/preferences of a person manipulated to be dissimilar from self (participants considered the identical opinion question across phases on half the trials and two different opinion questions for across phases on the other half of trials).
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To test these hypotheses, participants in the current study underwent fMRI scanning while answering a series of questions that required introspection about their opinions or preferences (e.g., “How frustrated do you get sitting in traffic?” see Methods). If ( i) repeatedly considering one's own mental states produces repetition suppression in self-sensitive regions such as vMPFC, and ( ii) one engages in self-referential processing when considering the minds of similar others, then ( iii) repetition suppression also should be observed when perceivers first mentalize about a similar other and then introspect about self. These characteristics of repetition suppression render it well suited for examining the hypothesis that mentalizing about like-minded individuals draws on the same cognitive processes as introspecting about one's own mental characteristics. In this way, two tasks could possibly coactivate the same brain voxel despite engaging different sets of neurons that subserve disparate cognitive processes. Because such techniques integrate neural activity across hundreds of thousands of neurons, activation of the same brain voxel by different tasks might occur because each activates distinct, but neighboring or interdigitated, neuronal populations. However, although colocalization of function provides positive evidence that two tasks draw on the same set of mental operations, the limited spatial resolution of hemodynamic imaging techniques, such as fMRI, prevents researchers from using shared functional neuroanatomy as the basis for strong conclusions about the overlap of cognitive process. That the same brain region appears to subserve introspection about oneself and mental state inferences about similar others suggests that an overlapping set of cognitive processes carries out these two otherwise disparate tasks and is consistent with suggestions that perceivers may spontaneously refer to their own mental states to infer those of other people. Critically, this vMPFC region also has been observed repeatedly during tasks that require participants to introspect about their own mental experiences ( 15– 18), suggesting a connection between tasks that require self-referential thought and those that require inferences about the mental states of similar others. Specifically, a dorsal aspect of the medial prefrontal cortex has been associated with mentalizing about people perceived to be dissimilar from oneself, whereas a more ventral aspect of medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) has been linked to mentalizing about those perceived to be similar.
Across several studies, mentalizing about similar versus dissimilar others has been associated with a distinct division of labor in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region ubiquitously identified in neuroimaging studies of mental state inference ( 12– 14). Recently, researchers have used functional neuroimaging to illuminate a specific link between introspection about self and mentalizing about those people perceived to be similar ( 10, 11). These results suggest that thinking about the mind of another person may rely importantly on reference to one's own mental characteristics. Consistent with the hypothesis that perceivers spontaneously engage in self-referential processing when mentalizing about particular individuals, vMPFC response was suppressed when self-reflections followed either an initial reflection about self or a judgment of a similar, but not a dissimilar, other. To test whether people automatically refer to their own mental states when considering those of a similar other, we examined repetition-related suppression of vMPFC response during self-reflections that followed either an initial reflection about self or a judgment of another person. Such self-referential accounts of social cognition are supported by recent neuroimaging observations that a single brain region, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), is engaged both by tasks that require introspections about self and by tasks that require inferences about the minds of others perceived to be similar to self. One useful strategy for inferring others' mental states (i.e., mentalizing) may be to use one's own thoughts, feelings, and desires as a proxy for those of other people.
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