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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on December 7, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1876-1885; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm212
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Paying Attention to Social Meaning: An fMRI Study

Paula Tavares1, Andrew D. Lawrence2,3 and Philip J. Barnard2

1 Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal, 2 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, CB2 7EF Cambridge, UK, 3 Wales Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, CF10 3AT Cardiff, UK

Address correspondence to Paula Tavares, Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal. Email: ptavares{at}fc.ul.pt.

Animations of simple geometric shapes are readily interpreted as animate agents engaged in meaningful social interactions. Such animations have been shown to activate brain regions implicated in the detection of animate motion, in understanding the intentions of others as well as areas commonly linked to the processing of social and emotional information. However, attribution of animacy does not occur under all circumstances and the precise conditions under which specific regions are activated remains unclear. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study we manipulated viewers’ perspective to assess the part played by selective attention. Participants were cued to attend either to spatial properties of the movements or to the kind of social behavior it could represent. Activations that occurred to the initial cue, while observing the animations themselves and while responding to a postpresentation probe, were analyzed separately. Results showed that activity in the social brain network was strongly influenced by selective attention, and that remarkably similar activations were seen during film viewing and in response to probe questions. Our use of stimuli supporting rich and diverse social narratives likely enhanced the influence of top-down processes on neural activity in the social brain.

Key Words: amygdala • animacy • autism • dorsomedial prefrontal cortex • social cognition


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