Repetition suppression of ventromedial prefrontal activity during judgments of self and others
- *Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; and
- ‡School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, United Kingdom
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Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved January 31, 2008 (received for review September 15, 2007)
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Fig. 1.A region of vMPFC (−6, 45, 3; 47 voxels in extent) was defined from an explicit self-reference task in which judgments of one's own personality characteristics were compared with judgments of another person (i.e., self > other). On a separate task, participants completed a series of paired judgments, in which they introspected about their own preferences and opinions immediately after one of three types of judgments: (i) an initial report about self (self-after-self), (ii) a judgment of a person with the same sociopolitical attitudes as oneself (self-after-similar), or (iii) a judgment of a person with opposing attitudes (self-after-dissimilar). On an equal number of trials, participants considered the identical question for prime and self or a different question across the two phases. The bar graph depicts the BOLD response associated with these self-reports after subtracting out the response associated with the initial judgment (see Methods); values therefore represent the additional BOLD response specifically associated with subsequent judgments of self. For comparison purposes, the figure includes the response in this region to self-reports made in isolation (gray bar). Significant repetition suppression was observed for self-reports that followed either an initial self-report (blue bars) or a judgment of a similar other (red bars), but not judgments of a dissimilar other (green bars). Error bars represent the 95% confidence interval for within-subject designs (43).
Footnotes
- †To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jenkins{at}fas.harvard.edu
- © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
