Activity In Right Temporoparietal Junction Research Articles

Modulating the activity of right temporoparietal junction increased belief-based learning in an economic game.

Modulating the activity of right temporoparietal junction increased belief-based learning in an economic game.

Increased neural activity of right temporo-parietal junction causes different effect on altruism in situations of advantageous and disadvantageous inequity

Altruism is defined as the performance of “costly acts that confer economic benefits on other individuals”, which is one of the major puzzles in the behavioural sciences today. Altruistic behaviour not only facilitates interpersonal adaptation and harmony but also enhances social welfare and social responsibility. The right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) has been proposed as playing a key role in guiding human altruistic behaviour, but its precise functional contribution to altruistic behaviour in situations of advantageous and disadvantageous inequity remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to modulate the activation of the rTPJ through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in order to clarify the causal role of the rTPJ in altruistic behaviour in situations of advantageous and disadvantageous inequity. A total of 106 participants were randomly assigned to one of three stimulation conditions: anodal tDCS stimulation on the rTPJ; sham tDCS stimulation on the rTPJ and anodal tDCS stimulation on the primary visual cortex (VC)as the control group, and. After 20 min of stimulation, participants undertook a modified dictator game that measured altruistic behaviour. Mixed-effect logistic regressions were applied to statistical analyses in this study. The results indicated that anodal tDCS over the rTPJ increased participants’ altruistic tendency by increasing their tendency to choose altruistic options in trials with higher cost, as well as their tendency to behave altruistically in situations of advantageous but not disadvantageous inequity. These results suggested that increased neural activity of the rTPJ leads to different impacts on altruism in these two different inequity situations.

A neural mechanism underlying predictive visual motion processing in patients with schizophrenia

Psychotic symptoms may be traced back to sensory sensitivity. Thereby, visual motion (VM) processing particularly has been suggested to be impaired in schizophrenia (SCZ). In healthy brains, VM underlies predictive processing within hierarchically structured systems. However, less is known about predictive VM processing in SCZ. Therefore, we performed fMRI during a VM paradigm with three conditions of varying predictability, i.e., Predictable-, Random-, and Arbitrary motion. The study sample comprised 17 SCZ patients and 23 healthy controls. We calculated general linear model (GLM) analysis to assess group differences in VM processing across motion conditions. Here, we identified significantly lower activity in right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) for SCZ patients. Therefore, right TPJ was set as seed for connectivity analyses. For patients, across conditions we identified increased connections to higher regions, namely medial prefrontal cortex, or paracingulate gyrus. Healthy subjects activated sensory regions as area V5, or superior parietal lobule. Reduced TPJ activity may reflect both a failure in the bottom-up flow of visual information and a decrease of signal processing as consequence of increased top-down input from frontal areas. In sum, these altered neural patterns provide a framework for future studies focusing on predictive VM processing to identify potential biomarkers of psychosis.

Modulating the activity of right temporo-parietal junction increases bidding behavior in lottery contests

Contest often involves bids that are higher than the Nash equilibrium, and overbidding behaviour closely relates to personal reasoning and judgement. The right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) plays an important role in social, cognitive and inference decision-making. In the present study, we investigated the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the rTPJ on overbidding behaviour by using a modified model-lottery contests task. Our results showed that participants that received cathodal-stimulation had significantly higher expenditure compared to participants that received anodal and sham stimulation. Cathodal-stimulation may reduce the participants’ ability to infer other contestants’ intention or may modulate the non-monetary utility of winning. Our data indicate that excitability of the rTPJ may contribute to overbidding behaviour.

Modulating the activity of right temporo-parietal junction by anodal tDCS enhances the agent’s repayment in hold-up game

Hold-up problem is very common in non-contractible relation-specific investment transactions. And this problem can affect by trust, cooperation and altruism behavior of human beings. Recent neuroscience researches had explored a network of right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) involved in human cooperation and altruism behavior. The purpose of this study is to modulate the activation of rTPJ through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and to study the influence of rTPJ on investment and offer behavior in hold-up game. The results of our study showed that the anodal stimulation significantly increased participants' offer compared with the cathodal and sham stimulation. A possible explanation is that changes in rTPJ activity induced by anodal stimulation improve the accuracy of agents' mental reasoning and promote cooperation by influencing agents' offer behavior.

Emotional regulation neural circuitry abnormalities in adult bipolar disorder: dissociating effects of long-term depression history from relationships with present symptoms

Bipolar disorder (BD) is common and debilitating and confounding effects of depression history on neural activity in BD are unknown. We aimed to dissociate neural activity reflecting past depression-load vs. present symptom severity using the Course and Outcome of Bipolar Youth (COBY), a prospective longitudinal cohort study of pediatric-onset BD. In n = 54 COBY (18–32 years), we modeled depression scores over time (up to 17.5 years) using a standardized autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, followed by k-means cluster analysis. N = 36 healthy participants (HC, 20–36 years) were included. Using two factorial analyses, we parsed the impact of ARMA-defined past depression-load on neural activity from the impact of current symptoms on neural activity (p < 0.001, k > 30) and examined relationships with past and present symptoms (ps FDR-corrected). ARMA identified three COBY groups based on past depression-load. ARMA-defined COBY participants with the greatest past depression-load vs. other groups showed greater activity in right temporoparietal junction, thalamus, insula, premotor cortex, left fusiform gyrus, bilateral precuneus and cerebellum. In contrast, BD-COBY participants vs. HC showed greater activity in left hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right somatosensory cortex, plus the above thalamus, premotor cortex and cerebellum; activity positively correlated with present symptom severity in most regions. Past depression-load was related to social cognition and salience perception network activity, potentially reflecting heightened attention to socially relevant distracters, while present symptoms were associated with emotion processing and reappraisal network activity, potentially reflecting abnormal emotional experience and regulation. Differentiating aberrant neural activity related to long-term depression vs. present affective symptoms can help target interventions to networks associated with pathophysiological processes, rather than long-term illness effects.

Joint Attention During Live Person-to-Person Contact Activates rTPJ, Including a Sub-Component Associated With Spontaneous Eye-to-Eye Contact.

Eye-to-eye contact is a spontaneous behavior between interacting partners that occurs naturally during social interactions. However, individuals differ with respect to eye gaze behaviors such as frequency of eye-to-eye contacts, and these variations may reflect underlying differences in social behavior in the population. While the use of eye signaling to indicate a shared object of attention in joint attention tasks has been well-studied, the effects of the natural variation in establishing eye contact during joint attention have not been isolated. Here, we investigate this question using a novel two-person joint attention task. Participants were not instructed regarding the use of eye contacts; thus all mutual eye contact events between interacting partners that occurred during the joint attention task were spontaneous and varied with respect to frequency. We predicted that joint attention systems would be modulated by differences in the social behavior across participant pairs, which could be measured by the frequency of eye contact behavior. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning and eye-tracking to measure the neural signals associated with joint attention in interacting dyads and to record the number of eye contact events between them. Participants engaged in a social joint attention task in which real partners used eye gaze to direct each other’s attention to specific targets. Findings were compared to a non-social joint attention task in which an LED cue directed both partners’ attention to the same target. The social joint attention condition showed greater activity in right temporoparietal junction than the non-social condition, replicating prior joint attention results. Eye-contact frequency modulated the joint attention activity, revealing bilateral activity in social and high level visual areas associated with partners who made more eye contact. Additionally, when the number of mutual eye contact events was used to classify each pair as either “high eye contact” or “low eye contact” dyads, cross-brain coherence analysis revealed greater coherence between high eye contact dyads than low eye contact dyads in these same areas. Together, findings suggest that variation in social behavior as measured by eye contact modulates activity in a subunit of the network associated with joint attention.

Neural Mechanisms of Attitude Change Toward Stigmatized Individuals: Temporoparietal Junction Activity Predicts Bias Reduction.

Psychological and neural evidence suggests that negative attitudes toward stigmatized individuals arise in part from failures to perceive them as social targets. Here, we tested whether experimentally up-regulating neural regions involved in social cognition would predict subsequent decreases in bias toward stigmatized individuals (i.e., people who use substances). Participants underwent fMRI while completing either a lovingkindness intervention task or a control task, and each task was reinforced via daily text messages for a month following the one-time fMRI scan. Changes in implicit bias against stigmatized individuals were measured by Implicit Association Tests. The lovingkindness intervention task, compared to a control task, elicited greater baseline activity in right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), implicated in mentalizing, or the process of making inferences about others' mental states. The lovingkindness task compared to the control task also produced marginal decreases in bias over the month of the intervention. Individual differences in initial RTPJ activity at baseline during the fMRI intervention tasks further predicted improved implicit attitudes toward stigmatized individuals a month later. The current study suggests that individual differences in people's tendency to engage brain regions that support taking others' perspectives are associated with greater changes in bias reduction over time. It is possible that strategies that up-regulate mentalizing activity, such as lovingkindness training and other strategies that increase social-cognitive processing, may be effective in shifting people's biases against stigmatized individuals.

Communication of emotion via drumming: dual-brain imaging with functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Nonverbal communication of emotion is essential to human interaction and relevant to many clinical applications, yet it is an understudied topic in social neuroscience. Drumming is an ancient nonverbal communication modality for expression of emotion that has not been previously investigated in this context. We investigate the neural response to live, natural communication of emotion via drumming using a novel dual-brain neuroimaging paradigm. Hemodynamic signals were acquired using whole-head functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Dyads of 36 subjects participated in two conditions, drumming and talking, alternating between ‘sending’ (drumming or talking to partner) and ‘receiving’ (listening to partner) in response to emotionally salient images from the International Affective Picture System. Increased frequency and amplitude of drum strikes was behaviorally correlated with higher arousal and lower valence measures and neurally correlated with temporoparietal junction (TPJ) activation in the listener. Contrast comparisons of drumming greater than talking also revealed neural activity in right TPJ. Together, findings suggest that emotional content communicated by drumming engages right TPJ mechanisms in an emotionally and behaviorally sensitive fashion. Drumming may provide novel, effective clinical approaches for treating social–emotional psychopathology.

Deciding for others as a neutral party recruits risk-neutral perspective-taking: Model-based behavioral and fMRI experiments

Risky decision making for others is ubiquitous in our societies. Whereas financial decision making for oneself induces strong concern about the worst outcome (maximin concern) as well as the expected value, behavioral and neural characteristics of decision making for others are less well understood. We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to examine the neurocognitive underpinnings of risky decisions for an anonymous other, using decisions for self as a benchmark. We show that, although the maximin concern affected both types of decisions equally strongly, decision making for others recruited a more risk-neutral computational mechanism than decision making for self. Specifically, participants exhibited more balanced information search when choosing a risky option for others. Activity of right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ, associated with cognitive perspective taking) was parametrically modulated by options’ expected values in decisions for others, and by the minimum amounts in decisions for self. Furthermore, individual differences in self-reported empathic concern modified these attentional and neural processes. Overall, these results indicate that the typical maximin concern is attenuated in a risk-neutral direction in decisions for others as compared to self. We conjecture that, given others’ diverse preferences, deciding as a neutral party may cognitively recruit such risk-neutrality.

Exciting the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Influences Moral Intention Processing

When we evaluate the moral status of an action,we consider not only its consequences but also the beliefs and intentions of the actor,which relies on the capacity to infer others' mental states.Functional MRI studies showed that the right temporo-parietal junction(RTPJ) is the critical brain region for understanding others' mental states.Previous studies have found that the role of intention processing in moral judgment was reduced by disrupting the RTPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS).In the current study,we enhanced the role of intention processing in moral judgment with the transcranial direct current sitmulation(tDCS),a painless,non-invasive brain stimulation technique that allows us to induce polarity-specific excitability changes in the human brain.Many tDCS studies have confirmed the anodal excitation effect for cognitive functions.However,so far,limited work has been done to explore the tDCS effect on social cognitive function such as moral judgment.Therefore,the present study aims to investigate the anodal excitation effect of tDCS on moral judgment.We hypothesize that exciting the neural activity of RTPJ with anodal tDCS could enhance the role of intention processing in moral judgment.To test our hypothesis,18 healthy college students were recruited to participate in the study.All subjects underwent two tDCS sessions(anodal and sham tDCS) in random order and counterbalanced across subjects on 2 separate days with 1 week interval between both stimulations.We applied anodal(1.5mA,20 min) and sham tDCS(1.5mA,15 sec) on the RTPJ while subjects were introduced to keep a resting state.After stimulation,subjects read stories in a 2(intention: negative vs.neutral) × 2(outcome: negative vs.neutral) design and were asked to make moral judgment about how much blame the actor deserves.We analyzed the moral evaluation score and reaction time by a 2(intention) × 2(outcome) × 2(tDCS: anodal,sham) repeated measures ANOVA.Results showed that actors with negative intentions were judged more morally blameworthy than those with neutral intentions,and actors producing negative outcomes were judged more blameworthy than those causing neutral outcomes.The differences between no harm(neutral intention,neutral outcome) and accidental harm(neutral intention,negative outcome) were larger than that between attempted harm(negative intention,neutral outcome) and successful harm(negative intention,negative outcome).For the reaction time,judgments of negative outcomes were faster than that of neutral outcomes.The responses to attempted and accidental harm were slower than the other two conditions.Most importantly,the moral judgment was slower under anodal tDCS than sham tDCS stimulation,especially under the attempted harm and accidental harm conditions.These results highlight the role of intention processing in moral judgment.People will spend more time integrating the intention and outcome information in order to make normal moral judgment.Furthermore,the present research provides us a better understanding about the role of RTPJ in moral judgment.Using anodal tDCS to excite the neural activity of RTPJ enhanced the capacity of mentalizing in moral judgment,especially in the cases of attempted harm and accidental harm.

Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions

Intentional harms are typically judged to be morally worse than accidental harms. Distinguishing between intentional harms and accidents depends on the capacity for mental state reasoning (i.e., reasoning about beliefs and intentions), which is supported by a group of brain regions including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). Prior research has found that interfering with activity in RTPJ can impair mental state reasoning for moral judgment and that high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders make moral judgments based less on intent information than neurotypical participants. Three experiments, using multivoxel pattern analysis, find that (i) in neurotypical adults, the RTPJ shows reliable and distinct spatial patterns of responses across voxels for intentional vs. accidental harms, and (ii) individual differences in this neural pattern predict differences in participants' moral judgments. These effects are specific to RTPJ. By contrast, (iii) this distinction was absent in adults with autism spectrum disorders. We conclude that multivoxel pattern analysis can detect features of mental state representations (e.g., intent), and that the corresponding neural patterns are behaviorally and clinically relevant.

Activity in Right Temporo-Parietal Junction is Not Selective for Theory-of-Mind

Recent researchers have suggested that a region of right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) selectively subserves the attribution of beliefs to other people (Saxe R, Kanwisher N. 2003. People thinking about thinking people: fMRI investigations of theory of mind. NeuroImage. 19:1835-1842; Saxe R, Powell LJ. 2006. It's the thought that counts: specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind. Psychol Sci. 17:692-699; Saxe R, Wexler A. 2005. Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia. 43:1391-1399). At the same time, a similar RTPJ region has been observed repeatedly in a variety of nonsocial tasks that require participants to redirect attention to task-relevant stimuli (e.g., Corbetta M, Shulman GL. 2002. Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 3:201-215; Serences JT, Shomstein S, Leber AB, Golay X, Egeth HE, Yantis S. 2005. Coordination of voluntary and stimulus-driven attentional control in human cortex. Psychol Sci. 16:114-122). However, because these 2 sets of tasks have never been compared within the same participants, it remains unclear whether these observations refer to the exact same region of RTPJ or may instead involve neighboring regions with distinct functional profiles. To test the claim that there is a region of RTPJ selective for belief attribution, the current study used functional neuroimaging to examine the extent to which cortical loci identified by a "theory-of-mind localizer" also distinguish between trials on a target detection task that varied demands to reorient attention (i.e., a version of the "Posner cueing task"). Results were incompatible with claims of RTPJ selectivity for mental state attribution. Regardless of whether regions were defined from group analyses or were individually tailored for each participant, RTPJ activity was also modulated by the nonsocial attentional task. The overlap between theory-of-mind and attentional reorienting suggests the need for new accounts of RTPJ function that integrate across these disparate task comparisons.