Dissociation Between Knowledge And Action In Processing Of False Belief And Its Neural Correlates

To a large extent, succeeding in the social interactions depends on the acquisition of a specific cognitive mechanism known as theory of mind, which enables us to understand one's own and other people's mental states, and to use this social knowledge to explain or predict others'social behavior. While further work must be performed to determine the exact cognitive mechanisms, theory of mind has gained growing interest across different disciplines during the past more than30years. The present study mainly focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of others' false beliefs using a decompositional approach. Firstly, we investigated whether understanding others' false beliefs or applying others'false beliefs is unintentional and efficient. Our results showed that when participants were explicitly instructed to apply their social knowledge of others' mental states during the task, this improved the participants' performance in applying others'false beliefs to predict others'behavior than those were not explicitly instructed to apply others' mental states. However, this effect from different instructions disappeared when the task required participants to understand others'false beliefs. We also found that higher processing costs were found in applying false beliefs than applying reality information in higher attentional load condition, but no significant difference was found between understanding false beliefs and understanding reality information. These results suggest that an asymmetric relationship exists between applying and understanding others' false beliefs with regards to their degree of automaticity. Understanding others' false beliefs appears to be more automatic, occurring spontaneously and efficiently, whereas applying knowledge of false beliefs appears to require intention to initiate and effort to complete. Also, we investigated separately the ability to understand others'false beliefs and the ability to apply understanding of the others'false beliefs in both remitted schizophrenia and non-remitted schizophrenia. Our findings indicated patients with remitted schizophrenia showed deficits in applying others'false beliefs, but appeared to retain normal ability in understanding others'false beliefs, suggestting a dissociation of understanding others' false beliefs from applying others'false beliefs in remitted schizophrenia. Finally, we explored the neural basis of understanding others'false beliefs and applying others'false beliefs by an event-related potentials study, separately. Our results indicated that the late negative component in centro-frontal areas was related with understanding others' false beliefs, which was located in the left cingulate cortex. This finding implies that error awareness is invovled the operation of false beliefs conception. On the other hand, we found that a late frontal negativity (LFN) and a late parietal positivity (LPP) were followed by instruction-cue during the stage of task preparation on the task of applying others'false beliefs. The LFN/LPP divergence was located in the right inferior frontal sulcus. And, a right centro-frontal N270was followed by stimulus during the stage of response selection on the task of applying others'false beliefs, which was located in right superior temporal sulcus. These findings confirm that two critical behavior control processes (i.e., task set and conflict control) were associated with applying others'false beliefs. The present study makes strong contributions for understanding the exact neurocognitive mechanism underlying theory of mind. Firstly, the present study extends the previous researches. We demonstrated that the asymmetric relationship of unintentional feature and efficient feature between understanding others' false beliefs and applying others' false beliefs. Secondly, present study might help to better understand the ToM deficits in schizophrenia. Finally, the present study is, to my best knowledge, the first attempt to directly investigate the neural basis of understanding others'false beliefs and applying others' false beliefs by event-related potentials, separately. A novel notion of the dissociation between understanding others'false beliefs and applying others'false beliefs during false beliefs task is proposed here, which provides an important perspective for further research.