Reduced neural selectivity for mental states in deaf children with delayed exposure to sign language.

Language provides a rich source of information about other people's thoughts and feelings. Consequently, delayed access to language may influence conceptual development in Theory of Mind (ToM). We use functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral tasks to study ToM development in child (n = 33, 4-12 years old) and adult (n = 36) fluent signers of American Sign Language (ASL), and characterize neural ToM responses during ASL and movie-viewing tasks.

There's more to "sparkle" than meets the eye: Knowledge of vision and light verbs among congenitally blind and sighted individuals.

We examined the contribution of first-person sensory experience to concepts by comparing the meanings of perception (visual/tactile) and emission (light/sound) verbs among congenitally blind (N = 25) and sighted speakers (N = 22). Participants judged semantic similarity for pairs of verbs referring to events of visual (e.g.

Mentalizing regions represent distributed, continuous, and abstract dimensions of others' beliefs.

The human capacity to reason about others' minds includes making causal inferences about intentions, beliefs, values, and goals. Previous fMRI research has suggested that a network of brain regions, including bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and medial prefrontal-cortex (MPFC), are reliably recruited for mental state reasoning. Here, in two fMRI experiments, we investigate the representational content of these regions.

When minds matter for moral judgment: intent information is neurally encoded for harmful but not impure acts.

Recent behavioral evidence indicates a key role for intent in moral judgments of harmful acts (e.g. assault) but not impure acts (e.

Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind networks with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli.

Functional localizer tasks allow researchers to identify brain regions in each individual's brain, using a combination of anatomical and functional constraints. In this study, we compare three social cognitive localizer tasks, designed to efficiently identify regions in the "Pain Matrix," recruited in response to a person's physical pain, and the "Theory of Mind network," recruited in response to a person's mental states (i.e.

Thinking about seeing: perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults.

Blind people's inferences about how other people see provide a window into fundamental questions about the human capacity to think about one another's thoughts. By working with blind individuals, we can ask both what kinds of representations people form about others' minds, and how much these representations depend on the observer having had similar mental states themselves. Thinking about others' mental states depends on a specific group of brain regions, including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ).

Theory of mind: a neural prediction problem.

Predictive coding posits that neural systems make forward-looking predictions about incoming information. Neural signals contain information not about the currently perceived stimulus, but about the difference between the observed and the predicted stimulus. We propose to extend the predictive coding framework from high-level sensory processing to the more abstract domain of theory of mind; that is, to inferences about others' goals, thoughts, and personalities.

Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions.

Intentional harms are typically judged to be morally worse than accidental harms. Distinguishing between intentional harms and accidents depends on the capacity for mental state reasoning (i.e.

fMRI item analysis in a theory of mind task.

Conventional analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data compare the brain's response to stimulus categories (e.g., pictures of faces, stories about beliefs) across participants.