Involvement of the mentalizing network in social and non-social high construal

Abstract

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is consistently involved in tasks requiring the processing of mental states, and much rarer so by tasks that do not involve mental state inferences. We hypothesized that the dmPFC might be more generally involved in high construal of stimuli, defined as the formation of concepts or ideas by omitting non-essential features of stimuli, irrespective of their social or non-social nature. In an fMRI study, we presented pictures of a person engaged in everyday activities (social stimuli) or of objects (non-social stimuli) and induced a higher level of construal by instructing participants to generate personality traits of the person or categories to which the objects belonged. This was contrasted against a lower level task where participants had to describe these same pictures visually. As predicted, we found strong involvement of the dmPFC in high construal, with substantial overlap across social and non-social stimuli, including shared activation in the vmPFC/OFC, parahippocampal, fusiform and angular gyrus, precuneus, posterior cingulate and right cerebellum.

Keywords: construal level; mPFC; mentalizing; theory of mind.

Fig. 1

Example pictures for person and object trials.

Fig. 2

Conjunction of High > Low Construal Level [i.e. Person (Category > Visual) ∩ Object (Category > Visual)] and Low > High Construal Level [i.e. Person (Visual > Category) ∩ Object (Visual > Category)] (P < 0.001; uncorrected).