Understanding The Cognitive Neural Mechanisms: Your Faith And Friends Behavior And Erp

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to understand self and other’s mental states, such as beliefs, desires, emotions and intentions, to explain and predict self and other’s behaviours. The ability to understand self and others’minds is the cognitive foundation for interpersonal interaction, beliefs that people possessed determine their mental activities. In order to investigate how we differentiate and understand self and friend’s beliefs, we recorded human event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while subjects made judgments that how likely they or their friends would agree with the belief or appearance questions, appearance judgments as baseline. Behaviour results showed that it was faster to make judgments about self than friends, and it was faster to make judgments about beliefs than appearances. ERP results showed that N200-300was larger in friend condition relative to self condition. N300-400was not only larger in friend condition relative to self condition, but also larger in belief condition relative to appearance condition. The results mean that when we reason about self and others’mental states, we distinguish self and others first, then make judgment about their mental states. The dipole source analysis showed a generator located in the vicinity of left temporo-parietal junction when understanding self’s belief, and a generator in the vicinity of left superior temporal sulcus when understanding friend’s belief in200-300ms. They both activated the vicinity of posterior cingulate cortex in300-400ms. The dipole source results showed activities of the brain regions in different time courses. All the results above indicated that the time course of understanding self and friend’s beliefs was distinct.