Mindreading mindreading: Using multivariate pattern analysis to decode the neural basis of mental state ascription.

Mindreading (also known as mentalising, or Theory of Mind) is the ability to think about what others see, know, think, want and intend, and is thought to be a fundamental basis of social interaction and communication. Mindreading has been widely studied in young children and infants, is known to be impaired in people with autism and schizophrenia, and more recently its cognitive and neural basis has begun to be studied in adults. Research using brain imaging, and examining the effects of brain injury and brain stimulation, converges on the view that some brain regions are distinctively involved in mindreading compared with similar tasks that do not involve understanding other minds, leading to suggestions that they comprise a "social" or "mindreading brain network". It is typically assumed that these brain regions represent mindreading information. However, a recent alternative suggestion is that mindreading information is represented elsewhere, perhaps in "semantic" brain regions, and that the mindreading brain network merely controls access to this information. Testing between these views is critical for our understanding of how the brain supports mindreading, and has implications for long-debated theoretical accounts about how we mindread.

The fundamental unit of mindreading is a representation that relates a particular AGENT (e.g., Mariam) to a particular CONTENT (e.g., ...thinks there's a rabbit in the box). We will ask participants to hold such information briefly in mind using tasks that present pictures of people and simple scenarios that depict what they are thinking. Thus, participants will be led to hold in mind something like "Mariam thinks there's a rabbit in the box, but I know there's really a bell", with the particular AGENT and the particular CONTENTS varying from trial to trial. If "mindreading brain regions" are centrally involved in representing such information, then it should be possible to decode the AGENT who is thinking (Mariam in this case), and the CONTENT they are thinking about (Rabbit) from patterns of brain activity in these areas. However, if "mindreading brain regions" actually only direct attention to information represented "semantic" brain regions then, it should be possible to decode AGENT and CONTENT information from activity in "semantic" brain areas, but not "mindreading" areas.

The work is made possible by recent developments in tasks for assessing mindreading and analytic techniques for decoding information from fine-grained patterns of human brain activity. Our tasks present mindreading problems for a large number of trials over which AGENT and CONTENT are systematically varied. Three experiments will focus on CONTENT (Experiment 1), AGENT+CONTENT (Experiment 2), and the co-ordination of CONTENT information over time (Experiment 3). Experiments 1 and 2 will employ fMRI, which gives excellent spatial resolution, while Experiment 3 will use EEG, which gives excellent temporal resolution. All three experiments will employ advanced techniques for multivariate analysis of brain activity data to examine whether we can indeed decode information about who is thinking what from "mindreading" or "semantic" brain regions.

Our studies will show whether regions of the social brain actually encode information necessary for mindreading, and determine the order in which such information is activated. These results will have implications for how the brain supports mindreading, and how mindreading may be disrupted through brain injury, or atypical brain function in disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Public understanding of the science of "mindreading".

A primary non-academic impact of our work will be in helping people to understand a fundamental basis of social co-ordination in adults, and an exciting research method that has gained public attention through its potential as a tool for "reading people's minds".

Our ability to think about the mental states of others - mindreading - is a cornerstone of human social cognition. Much debate surrounds when these abilities develop in children, the possible existence of some similar abilities in non-human animals, and why it is that some people seem to be better mindreaders than others. We are very experienced with using our on-going programme of primary scientific work to spark public interest in our work, in these broader questions, and in how scientific psychology and neuroscience can tackle these apparently abstract topics. In particular, the proposed work invites discussion about how the brain supports cognitive functions, via a combination of processes operating over mental representations, augmented by superordinate controlling processes.

In parallel with this our project will use "mindreading" methods for multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data. Such techniques are cutting-edge research tools, and have also come to prominence in popular science through suggestions that they can be used for lie-detection and other interesting or alarming applications. Our work will both demonstrate the deployment of these methods in basic scientific research (rather than more exotic applications), and also invite critical discussion about whether this approach could realistically be extended from compliant experimental participants to be practically useful in forensic settings.

Audiences of teachers, parents and the public at large will be reached through 1) outreach work that we undertake in collaboration with Birmingham Thinktank (the Birmingham Science Museum), where we conduct demonstrations and discussion sessions with visitors to the museum, 2) public seminars and discussion sessions at the annual British Science Festival, and 3) outreach activities at the University of Birmingham's annual Community Day. In addition to these activities we will take opportunities to disseminate our findings more widely to the public. For example, the PI (Apperly) has appeared on local BBC radio to discuss research findings on "mindreading", and his work has been highlighted in both New Scientist and Science magazines. The Co-I (Wimber) has appeared on BBC News and in Nature podcasts, and been covered in The Guardian, The Times, and New York Times, concerning her work employing multivariate pattern analyses to study human memory.

Capacity building
The research fellow on the project will be embedded in the labs of Apperly and Wimber, where s/he will receive training in basic neuroimaging methods, cutting-edge techniques for multivariate analyses of imaging data, and contemporary work on social cognition and mindreading. S/he will also receive training and experience in public engagement with science through secondments at Birmingham Thinktank.