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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2007 2(3):217-226; doi:10.1093/scan/nsm014
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Distinct regions of medial rostral prefrontal cortex supporting social and nonsocial functions

Sam J. Gilbert1, Iain D. M. Williamson1, Iroise Dumontheil1, Jon S. Simons1, Christopher D. Frith2 and Paul W. Burgess1

1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and 2Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

While some recent neuroimaging studies have implicated medial rostral prefrontal cortex (MPFC) in ‘mentalizing’ and self-reflection, others have implicated this region in attention towards perceptual vs self-generated information. In order to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we used fMRI to investigate MPFC activity related to these two functions in a factorial design. Participants performed two separate tasks, each of which alternated between ‘stimulus-oriented phases’ (SO), where participants attended to task-relevant perceptual information, and ‘stimulus-independent phases’ (SI), where participants performed the same tasks in the absence of such information. In half of the blocks (‘mentalizing condition’), participants were instructed that they were performing these tasks in collaboration with an experimenter; in other blocks (‘non-mentalizing condition’), participants were instructed that the experimenter was not involved. In fact, the tasks were identical in these conditions. Neuroimaging data revealed adjacent but clearly distinct regions of activation within MPFC related to (i) mentalizing vs non-mentalizing conditions (relatively caudal/superior) and (ii) SO vs SI attention (relatively rostral/inferior). These results generalized from one task to the other, suggesting a new axis of functional organization within MPFC.

Keywords: area 10; attention; medial prefrontal cortex; mentalizing; theory of mind

Correspondence should be addressed to Sam J. Gilbert, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. E-mail: sam.gilbert{at}ucl.ac.uk.

Received January 19, 2007. Accepted April 9, 2007.


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