Shapeception: Unravelling Brain Activity during Animated Shape Perception and Mentalization

TL;DR

This study explores brain activity during animated shape perception, revealing neural correlates of mentalization and empathy, and proposes a brain-based model for detecting Theory of Mind difficulties relevant to disorders like ASD.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel analysis incorporating participant responses, identifies specific brain regions involved in mentalization of shapes, and develops a model for assessing ToM impairments.

Findings

Robust activation in mPFC during shape perception.

Identification of TPOj and pSTS regions linked to mentalization.

Potential application in ASD diagnosis and mentalization assessment.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the brain activity elicited during perception of animated shapes as stimuli, which have been found to evoke mental state attributions. Contrary to a previous study, we incorporated the participants' responses in the analysis, and observed robust activations in mPFC, which has been found to play an important role in understanding other's and one's own nature. From our analyses, TPOj was observed showing robust activation during the task as well as functionally connected to AA and LTC, which lead to speculation that empathy might co-occur with mentalizing in the task and that humans might be able to empathize with these interacting shapes, in spite of lacking human features. Along with this, in one of our analyses, we were able to localize a region close to the pSTS, where the activation depicted the participants' 'ability to mentalize'. Based on our observations, we modelled the prediction of mentalization and propose our model as an approach towards developing a brain-activity based model to detect ToM (Theory of Mind) difficulties, which could be useful in research about disorders like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as well as assessment of mentalization-based treatments. Additionally, we use our findings to reiterate how the Resting State might not always act as a good control condition and that control conditions should be task-specific.