Spatiotemporal cognitive modes underlying theory of mind: A Human Connectome Project fMRI study

Theory of mind (ToM), or mentalization, is a core aspect of social cognition that enables individuals to infer the mental states of others. Brain activity underlying ToM has been extensively studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with a primary focus on the Default Mode (DM). We investigated the interplay of multiple cognitive modes (i.e., cognitive processes eliciting distinct fMRI-derived spatiotemporal patterns) engaged during ToM, extending beyond but still including the DM. We analyzed a large-scale fMRI dataset from the Human Connectome Project Social (HCP) Cognition task, where participants (n=500) evaluated whether movements of animated shapes depicted social or random interactions. Six cognitive modes were retrieved using constrained principal component analysis (CPCA): (1) Multiple Demand (MD), (2) Default Mode B (DM-B), (3) Auditory Attention for Response (AAR), (4) Focus on Visual Features (FVF), (5) Language (LAN), and (6) Re-Evaluation (RE-EV). The functions of these cognitive modes have been characterized based on analyses of their task-induced blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) changes over many tasks, but in the context of the HCP Social Cognition task, their BOLD changes were interpreted as: (1) mentally projecting into social narratives (DM-B), (2) allocating external attention to task-relevant components (MD), (3) processing non-verbal communication (LAN), (4) focusing on visual features of the social stimuli (FVF), (5) suppressing auditory attention due to increased visual attention (AAR), and (6) re-evaluating for possibly missed social patterns (RE-EV). Thus, our results confirmed the activation of DM during ToM, but also specified the contributions of five additional cognitive modes. An application of this work is that the six sets of mode-aligned functional patterns can serve as separate inputs for machine learning algorithms aimed at subtyping patients with psychiatric conditions to advance toward precision psychiatry.