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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on May 18, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 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

Original Papers

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

Lucina Q. Uddin 1 *, Istvan Molnar-Szakacs 2, Eran Zaidel 1, and Marco Iacoboni 3

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

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Lucina Q. Uddin, E-mail: lucina{at}ucla.edu


  Abstract

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.
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