Humans think constantly about one another's thoughts, for example, in order to communicate, to teach, to learn from, to cooperate with, to compete with, and to deceive one another. This ability to fluently infer what others are thinking i impaired in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but the neural basis of this impairment is poorly understood. In particular, brain regions involved in thinking about other people's thoughts are not reliably smaller or less active in individuals with ASD. This proposal will test the possibilities that (i) reduced magnitude of activity, (ii) disorganization of the patern of activity, and/or (iii) altered connectivity of these brain regions that leads to social impairmets in ASD. We will test these hypotheses about the function of ToM regions in adults with ASD, in three key areas of ToM: understanding others' thoughts that are relevant for moral judgments (e.g. intentional vs. accidental harm), for inferring emotions, and for effective communication. Since ASD is a developmental disorder, it is critical to understand the developmental trajectory of these brain regions as well as their end state. Consequently, we will also test these hypotheses in children aged 5-12 years. We will also test whether the selectivity or pattern of activation in ToM brain regions changes over development.

Public Health Relevance

Humans think constantly about one another's thoughts, for example, in order to communicate, to teach, to learn from, to cooperate with, to compete with, and to deceive one another. The ability to fluently infer what others are thinking is impaired in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but the neural basis of this impairment is poorly understood. This proposal will test the hypotheses that brain regions typically involved in thinking about other people's thoughts (i) are smaller or less active, (ii) have a disorganized pattern of activity, or (iii) have inappropriate connectivity, which leads to social impairments in adults and children with ASD.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH096914-04
Application #
8882085
Study Section
Cognition and Perception Study Section (CP)
Program Officer
Gilotty, Lisa
Project Start
2012-08-10
Project End
2016-04-30
Budget Start
2015-06-01
Budget End
2016-04-30
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department
Other Basic Sciences
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
001425594
City
Cambridge
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
Richardson, Hilary; Lisandrelli, Grace; Riobueno-Naylor, Alexa et al. (2018) Development of the social brain from age three to twelve years. Nat Commun 9:1027
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Anzellotti, Stefano; Kliemann, Dorit; Jacoby, Nir et al. (2017) Directed network discovery with dynamic network modelling. Neuropsychologia 99:1-11
Saxe, Rebecca; Houlihan, Sean Dae (2017) Formalizing emotion concepts within a Bayesian model of theory of mind. Curr Opin Psychol 17:15-21
Koster-Hale, Jorie; Richardson, Hilary; Velez, Natalia et al. (2017) Mentalizing regions represent distributed, continuous, and abstract dimensions of others' beliefs. Neuroimage 161:9-18
Wasserman, E A; Chakroff, A; Saxe, R et al. (2017) Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis. Neuroimage 159:371-387
Jacoby, Nir; Bruneau, Emile; Koster-Hale, Jorie et al. (2016) Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind networks with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Neuroimage 126:39-48
Chakroff, Alek; Dungan, James; Koster-Hale, Jorie et al. (2016) When minds matter for moral judgment: intent information is neurally encoded for harmful but not impure acts. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 11:476-84
Skerry, Amy E; Saxe, Rebecca (2015) Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features. Curr Biol 25:1945-54
Koster-Hale, Jorie; Bedny, Marina; Saxe, Rebecca (2014) Thinking about seeing: perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults. Cognition 133:65-78

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