Neural Correlates Of The Understanding Of Pretense:an Event-Related Potential Study

Pretense to be children in the life is the most interesting and also the most amazing in children’s behavior, so pretense has a special meaning on children development. In the past twenty years, along with Theory of Mind research, many researchers have been attracted to the study of pretense, some researchers think of pretense as a milestone in the process of Theory of Mind development, and think that pretense is the early phase in be the development of Theory of Mind.Although the understanding of pretense has been paid close attention to in the filed of theory of mind and cognitive development, so far, researchers paid little attention to its neural mechanism, there was only a few of fMRI studies of the pretense. There are some activated brain regions differences in the related fMRI technology research which explores processing differences between the real behavior and pretend behavior. However, what’s the process of the understanding of pretense on cognitive components and time course, at present there is no dynamic research. As Luck mentioned, the Event Related Potential (ERP) technology can directly determine the process of task in different stimuli operation condition(Luck,2005). Therefore, as fMRI, ERP may be another effective method which researches the related features of causality, In order to explore the cognitive component and time process of the understanding of pretense, in the present study, we used ERP technique to compare the brain electrophysiological activity in the real and pretend conditions.Pretending is the process of a pretender projecting his intention and mental representation onto reality. In the first experiment, Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured when 18 healthy right-handed adult did a identifying task. At first, we presented a picture of one object with its name. Then, we presented a picture in which someone held the object. The participants were told to judge whether the behavior in the picture was pretend or real. We mainly analyzed ERPs elicited in pretend and real conditions. Compared with real behavior, EEG results indicated that:the main effect of condition was significant in P200, P300 and Last positive component (LPC), namely, the amplitude in the pretend condition was greater than that in the real condition. P200 reflects the perception of novel stimulus in the early stage; P300 reflects the update of working memory; LPC reflects inhibitory control in the understanding of pretense.The second experiment has been improved in the basis of the first experiment. In the first experiment, When we presented the objects and pictures of the objects name, subjects may be firstly call the behavior pictures of real characterization to mind.And when we presented the behavior pictures of pretended characterization, that are different from the subjects’anticipation. Subjects need update of working memory and update the new characterization of the objects, so this process may be produce P300. Therefore the second experiment, we no longer presented objects and pictures of name, only presented a picture in which someone held the object. Then subjects were asked to judge the behavior whether belong to be pretend or not. The results of the second experiment show that, compared with real behavior, the main effect of condition was significant in P200, N200 and Last positive component (LPC).The P200, N200 may reflect the perception of novel stimulus in the early stage and Show that the understanding of pretense involved in the more attention in resources. The LPC reflects the understanding of pretense can’t do without inhibitory control.In a word, research from ERP experiment to investigate the process of the understanding of pretense and cognitive abilities involved in the pretense. The result show that the understanding of pretense was more complex than that of reality, which was reflected more extra processing process.