Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism during a Movie Narrative.

Background: While individuals with autism often face challenges in everyday social interactions, they may demonstrate proficiency in structured Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks that assess their ability to infer others' mental states. Using functional MRI and pupillometry, we investigated whether these discrepancies stem from diminished spontaneous mentalizing or broader difficulties in unstructured contexts.

Methods: Fifty-two adults diagnosed with autism and 52 neurotypical controls viewed 'Partly Cloudy', a nonverbal animated film with a dynamic social narrative known to engage the ToM brain network during specific scenes.

Integrating stereotypes and factual evidence in interpersonal communication.

Stereotypes can exert a powerful influence on our interactions with others, potentially leading to prejudice when factual evidence is ignored. Here, we identify neuroanatomical and developmental factors that influence the real-time integration of stereotypes and factual evidence during live social interactions. The study uses precisely quantified communicative exchanges in a longitudinal cohort of seventeen-year-olds followed since infancy, testing their ability to moderate stereotype tendencies toward children as contrary evidence accumulates.

The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds.

For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals.

Behavioral and EEG Measures Show no Amplifying Effects of Shared Attention on Attention or Memory.

Shared attention experiments examine the potential differences in function or behavior when stimuli are experienced alone or in the presence of others, and when simultaneous attention of the participants to the same stimulus or set is involved. Previous work has found enhanced reactions to emotional stimuli in social situations, yet these changes might represent enhanced communicative or motivational purposes. This study examines whether viewing emotional stimuli in the presence of another person influences attention to or memory for the stimulus.

Electrocorticographic dissociation of alpha and beta rhythmic activity in the human sensorimotor system.

This study uses electrocorticography in humans to assess how alpha- and beta-band rhythms modulate excitability of the sensorimotor cortex during psychophysically-controlled movement imagery. Both rhythms displayed effector-specific modulations, tracked spectral markers of action potentials in the local neuronal population, and showed spatially systematic phase relationships (traveling waves). Yet, alpha- and beta-band rhythms differed in their anatomical and functional properties, were weakly correlated, and traveled along opposite directions across the sensorimotor cortex.

Beyond the Isolated Brain: The Promise and Challenge of Interacting Minds.

As scientists, we brainstorm and develop experimental designs with our colleagues and students. Paradoxically, this teamwork has produced a field focused nearly exclusively on mapping the brain as if it evolved in isolation. Here, we discuss promises and challenges in advancing our understanding of how human minds connect during social interaction.

iEEG-BIDS, extending the Brain Imaging Data Structure specification to human intracranial electrophysiology.

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven specification for organizing neuroscience data and metadata with the aim to make datasets more transparent, reusable, and reproducible. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the living human brain. To improve internal (re)use and external sharing of these unique data, we present a specification for storing and sharing iEEG data: iEEG-BIDS.

Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in live non-verbal interactions, we characterized a novel cause for their communication deficits.

Encoding of Multiple Reward-Related Computations in Transient and Sustained High-Frequency Activity in Human OFC.

Human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been implicated in value-based decision making. In recent years, convergent evidence from human and model organisms has further elucidated its role in representing reward-related computations underlying decision making. However, a detailed description of these processes remains elusive due in part to (1) limitations in our ability to observe human OFC neural dynamics at the timescale of decision processes and (2) methodological and interspecies differences that make it challenging to connect human and animal findings or to resolve discrepancies when they arise.

Task switching in autism: An EEG study on intentions and actions.

One of the main symptoms of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) is experiencing cognitive inflexibility when adjustments of behaviour are required. While this so-called behavioural rigidity is broadly recognised in ASC, finding evidence for the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remains challenging. In this electroencephalographic (EEG) study, participants with ASC and matched controls were instructed to choose between two cognitive tasks in each trial, and to respond to the subsequently presented target stimulus according to their task choice.

Integrated analysis of anatomical and electrophysiological human intracranial data.

Human intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings provide data with much greater spatiotemporal precision than is possible from data obtained using scalp EEG, magnetoencephalography (MEG), or functional MRI. Until recently, the fusion of anatomical data (MRI and computed tomography (CT) images) with electrophysiological data and their subsequent analysis have required the use of technologically and conceptually challenging combinations of software. Here, we describe a comprehensive protocol that enables complex raw human iEEG data to be converted into more readily comprehensible illustrative representations.

Oxytocin modulates human communication by enhancing cognitive exploration.

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide known to influence how humans share material resources. Here we explore whether oxytocin influences how we share knowledge. We focus on two distinguishing features of human communication, namely the ability to select communicative signals that disambiguate the many-to-many mappings that exist between a signal's form and meaning, and adjustments of those signals to the presumed cognitive characteristics of the addressee ("audience design").

Communicative knowledge pervasively influences sensorimotor computations.

Referential pointing is a characteristically human behavior, which involves moving a finger through space to direct an addressee towards a desired mental state. Planning this type of action requires an interface between sensorimotor and conceptual abilities. A simple interface could supplement spatially-guided motor routines with communicative-ostensive cues.

Oxytocin Modulates Semantic Integration in Speech Comprehension.

Listeners interpret utterances by integrating information from multiple sources including word level semantics and world knowledge. When the semantics of an expression is inconsistent with their knowledge about the world, the listener may have to search through the conceptual space for alternative possible world scenarios that can make the expression more acceptable. Such cognitive exploration requires considerable computational resources and might depend on motivational factors.

Independent Causal Contributions of Alpha- and Beta-Band Oscillations during Movement Selection.

Unlabelled: To select a movement, specific neuronal populations controlling particular features of that movement need to be activated, whereas other populations are downregulated. The selective (dis)inhibition of cortical sensorimotor populations is governed by rhythmic neural activity in the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (15-25 Hz) frequency range. However, it is unclear whether and how these rhythms contribute independently to motor behavior.

Conceptual Alignment: How Brains Achieve Mutual Understanding.

We share our thoughts with other minds, but we do not understand how. Having a common language certainly helps, but infants' and tourists' communicative success clearly illustrates that sharing thoughts does not require signals with a pre-assigned meaning. In fact, human communicators jointly build a fleeting conceptual space in which signals are a means to seek and provide evidence for mutual understanding.

Altered communicative decisions following ventromedial prefrontal lesions.

Damage to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) leads to profound changes in everyday social interactions [1, 2]. Yet, in the lab, vmPFC patients show surprising proficiency in reasoning about other agents [3-8]. These conflicting observations suggest that what vmPFC patients lack in everyday social interactions might be the ability to guide their decisions with knowledge about a social partner [9-13], despite preserved access to that knowledge [2, 14].

Cerebral coherence between communicators marks the emergence of meaning.

How can we understand each other during communicative interactions? An influential suggestion holds that communicators are primed by each other's behaviors, with associative mechanisms automatically coordinating the production of communicative signals and the comprehension of their meanings. An alternative suggestion posits that mutual understanding requires shared conceptualizations of a signal's use, i.e.

Distinct roles for alpha- and beta-band oscillations during mental simulation of goal-directed actions.

Rhythmic neural activity within the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (15-25 Hz) frequency bands is modulated during actual and imagined movements. Changes in these rhythms provide a mechanism to select relevant neuronal populations, although the relative contributions of these rhythms remain unclear. Here we use MEG to investigate changes in oscillatory power while healthy human participants imagined grasping a cylinder oriented at different angles.

Understanding communicative actions: a repetitive TMS study.

Despite the ambiguity inherent in human communication, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. Studying how people communicate in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, a fundamental property of human communication. Previous work indicates that the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is involved when people understand the intended meaning of novel communicative actions.

Early social experience predicts referential communicative adjustments in five-year-old children.

A large body of work has focused on children's ability to attribute mental states to other people, and whether these abilities are influenced by the extent and nature of children's social interactions. However, it remains largely unknown which developmental factors shape children's ability to influence the mental states of others. Building on the suggestion that collaborative experiences early in life might be crucial for the emergence of mental coordination abilities, here we assess the relative contribution of social exposure to familial and non-familial agents on children's communicative adjustments to their mental model of an addressee ('audience design').

Neural mechanisms of communicative innovation.

Human referential communication is often thought as coding-decoding a set of symbols, neglecting that establishing shared meanings requires a computational mechanism powerful enough to mutually negotiate them. Sharing the meaning of a novel symbol might rely on similar conceptual inferences across communicators or on statistical similarities in their sensorimotor behaviors. Using magnetoencephalography, we assess spectral, temporal, and spatial characteristics of neural activity evoked when people generate and understand novel shared symbols during live communicative interactions.