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From the Cover
SOCIAL SCIENCES / BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / PSYCHOLOGY / PSYCHOLOGY
Repetition suppression of ventromedial prefrontal activity during judgments of self and others

Adrianna C. Jenkins^*,, C. Neil Macrae, and Jason P. Mitchell^*

*Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; and School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, United Kingdom

Edited by Edward E. Smith, Columbia University, New York, NY, and approved January 31, 2008 (received for review September 15, 2007)

One useful strategy for inferring others' mental states (i.e., mentalizing) may be to use one's own thoughts, feelings, and desires as a proxy for those of other people. Such self-referential accounts of social cognition are supported by recent neuroimaging observations that a single brain region, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), is engaged both by tasks that require introspections about self and by tasks that require inferences about the minds of others perceived to be similar to self. To test whether people automatically refer to their own mental states when considering those of a similar other, we examined repetition-related suppression of vMPFC response during self-reflections that followed either an initial reflection about self or a judgment of another person. Consistent with the hypothesis that perceivers spontaneously engage in self-referential processing when mentalizing about particular individuals, vMPFC response was suppressed when self-reflections followed either an initial reflection about self or a judgment of a similar, but not a dissimilar, other. These results suggest that thinking about the mind of another person may rely importantly on reference to one's own mental characteristics.

functional neuroimaging | mentalizing | self-reference | social cognition

Author contributions: A.C.J. and J.P.M. designed research; A.C.J. and J.P.M. performed research; A.C.J. and J.P.M. analyzed data; and A.C.J., C.N.M., and J.P.M. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0708785105/DC1.

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jenkins{at}fas.harvard.edu

© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

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