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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on May 18, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2006 1(1):65-71; doi:10.1093/scan/nsl003
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

rTMS to the right inferior parietal lobule disrupts self–other discrimination

Lucina Q. Uddin1,5, Istvan Molnar-Szakacs3,4,5,6, Eran Zaidel1,5 and Marco Iacoboni2,3,4,5

1Department of Psychology and 2Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, 3Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, 4FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development and 5Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA and 6Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Self–other discrimination is fundamental to social interaction, however, little is known about the neural systems underlying this ability. In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we demonstrated that a right fronto-parietal network is activated during viewing of self-faces as compared with the faces of familiar others. Here we used image-guided repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to create a ‘virtual lesion’ over the parietal component of this network to test whether this region is necessary for discriminating self-faces from other familiar faces. The current results indeed show that 1 Hz rTMS to the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) selectively disrupts performance on a self–other discrimination task. Applying 1 Hz rTMS to the left IPL had no effect. It appears that activity in the right IPL is essential to the task, thus providing for the first time evidence for a causal relation between a human brain area and this high-level cognitive capacity.

Keywords: self-awareness; self-recognition; social cognition; inferior parietal lobule; mirror neurons

Abbreviation: FDI = first dorsal interosseous; fMRI = functional magnetic resonance imaging; IPL = inferior parietal lobule; LH = left hemisphere; MEP = motor-evoked potential; MT = motor threshold; RH = right hemisphere; rTMS = repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Correspondence should be addressed to Lucina Q. Uddin, UCLA Psychology, Box 951563, B627 Franz Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. E-mail: lucina{at}ucla.edu


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