Human Interaction In The Psychological Theory Of Cognitive Neural Mechanism

For the last three decades there has been a continuous interest in humans'ability to impute mental states, such as desires, intentions or beliefs to themselves and others in order to predict or explain their behavior. Such ability has been traditionally viewed as requiring a theory of mind(ToM). ToM refers to understanding other's mental states, such as desire, belief, intention, and so on, in order to predict other's behaviors. Understanding other's mind and interacting minds are the cognitive basis of successful social interactions and it plays a crucial role in human's social activities. ToM is a complex cognitive function that requires integration of information from many sources. Although TOM has been thoroughly investigated by developmental psychologists, the neuroscience of this important ability has only recently begun to receive serious attention. Although many of the PET and fMRI studies have provided many important results to explore the brain mechanism of TOM, the time course of cortical activation could not be precisely studied by use of these technologies. However, the methods of event-related potentials (ERPs) recordings can provide critical temporal information for analyzing the functional neuroanatomy of cognitive processes. It has important scientific significance to investigate the dynamic process of the interacting minds.The experimental studies of the present dissertation consist of four studies. Study one investigated brain electrophysiological activities associated with mentalizing about self and friend's belief. Study two explored the temporal course of the affective states' impact on the decoding other's emotion in the eyes. Study three used eye-movement technique to explore the processing of process of reading another's mind and reading the interactive mind. Study four explored the dissociative electrophysiological correlates between reading another's mind and reading the interactive mind. The four conclusions are drawn as follows.1. The present study used belief questions to investigate brain electrophysiological activities associated with mentalizing about self and friend's belief. The result showed in200-400ms, the mean amplitudes for friend condition were larger than for self condition. In300-400ms, the mean amplitudes over frontal-central for belief condition were larger than for appearance condition. In400-500ms, the mean amplitudes over parietal for friend condition were larger than for self condition. These findings demonstrate that distinct cognitive representations of self and friend extend along many dimensions of self and other processing:from person perception to belief understanding.2. The present study used event-related potentials to assess the temporal dynamic of the impact of affective states on decoding other's emotion. The result showed, the N270amplitude was larger for the negative affective state than for the positive affective state. At the same time, the N270was larger for negative emotion in eyes after observing the positive affective picture elicited than after observing the negative affective picture, bur not for the positive emotion in eyes. Thereafter, the LPP amplitude was larger for the negative affective state than for the positive affective state.3. The present study used three types of Chinese four-character idioms-physical idioms, single person idioms and interactive idioms-and eye-movement technique to explore the processing of process of reading another's mind and reading the interactive mind. The result showed that the total reading times of the second character in single person idioms were longer than in physical idioms. Furthermore, the gaze durations of the first three characters in interactive idioms were longer than in both physical idioms and single person idioms. The above results suggest that individuals can distinguish mental processing from non-mental processing when they read the second character in idioms and can distinguish understanding the single mind from understanding the interactive mind when they read the first three characters in idioms.4. The present study used three types of Chinese four-character idioms-physical idioms, single person idioms and interactive idioms-to explore the dissociative electrophysiological correlates between reading another's mind and reading the interactive mind. The result showed in the500-to700-ms epoch, the mean amplitudes of LSW over frontal-central for physical representation significantly lower than for reading other's mind and reading interactive mind, while there was no difference between the latter two. That is, there was a frontal-central LSW associated with both reading other's mind and reading interactive mind. In the700-to800-ms epoch, the mean amplitudes of LSW for reading interactive mind was more positive than for reading other's mind and physical representation, while there was no difference between the latter two. That is, a LSW was observed for explicit reading interactive mind only.To sum up, the present dissertation examines the dynamic process of theory of mind and provied electrophysiological evidence for the theory of mind processing.