The Medial Frontal Cortex Mediates Self-Other Discrimination in the Joint Simon Task
A tDCS Study
Abstract
Abstract. Interacting with other individuals confronts cognitive control systems with the problem of how to distinguish between self-generated (internally triggered) and other-generated (externally triggered) action events. Recent neuroscience studies identified two core brain regions, the anterior medial frontal cortex (aMFC) and the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), to be potentially involved in resolving this problem either by enhancing self-generated versus other-generated event representations (via aMFC) and/or by inhibiting event representations that are externally triggered (via rTPJ). Using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), we investigated the role of the aMFC and the rTPJ for the online control of self-generated versus other-generated event representations in a joint Simon task. In two experimental sessions, participants received anodal, cathodal, or sham tDCS (1 mA intensity applied for 20 min), while performing an auditory joint Simon task. In addition to a general performance enhancement during cathodal (inhibitory) and anodal (excitatory) stimulation with increased practice, we found a significantly increased joint Simon effect (JSE) during cathodal stimulation of the aMFC (Experiment 1), as compared to sham stimulation. No modulation of the JSE was found during stimulation of the rTPJ (Experiment 2). By enhancing self-generated event representations the aMFC seems to be crucially involved in resolving the self-other discrimination problem in the joint Simon task.
References
(2008). Minds, persons, and space: An fMRI investigation into the relational complexity of higher-order intentionality. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 438–450.
(2003). Cognitive neuroscience of human social behaviour. Nature Reviews, 4, 165–178.
(2006). Meeting of minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 268–277.
(2004). A response-discrimination account of the Simon effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 30, 365–377.
(2004). Excitability changes induced in the human primary visual cortex by transcranial direct current stimulation: Direct electrophysiological evidence. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 45, 702–707.
(2004). Facilitation of visuo-motor learning by transcranial direct current stimulation of the motor extrastriate visual areas in humans. European Journal of Neuroscience, 19, 2888–2892.
(2004). Direct current stimulation over V5 enhances visuomotor coordination by improving motion perception in humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 521–527.
(2011). The joint flanker effect: Sharing tasks with real and imagined co-actors. Experimental Brain Research, 21, 371–385.
(2008). Action co-representation: The joint SNARC effect. Social Neuroscience, 3, 410–420.
(2007). The use of tDCS and CVS as methods of non-invasive brain stimulation. Brain Research Reviews, 56, 346–361.
(2009). Establishing safety limits for transcranial direct current stimulation. Clinical Neurophysiology, 120, 1033–1034.
(2010). Modulation of risk-taking in marijuana users by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 112, 220–225.
(2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108, 624–652.
(2004). Conflict monitoring and anterior cingulate cortex: An update. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 539–546.
(2000). Compatibility between observed and executed finger movements: Comparing symbolic, spatial, and imitative cues. Brain Cognition, 44, 124–143.
(2005). The inhibition of imitative and overlearned responses: A functional double dissociation. Neuropsychologia, 43, 89–98.
(2005). Imitation: Is cognitive neuroscience solving the correspondence problem? TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 9, 489–495.
(2009). Inhibition of imitative behavior and social cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 364, 2359–2367.
(2014). Medial prefrontal cortex reacts to unfairness if this damages the self: A tDCS study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1054–1060. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsu154
(2013). Increasing self-other integration through divergent thinking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 1011–1016.
(2014). Task-relevance dependent gradients in medial prefrontal and temporoparietal cortices suggest solutions to paradoxes concerning self/other control. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 42, 298–302.
(2008). Transcranial current stimulation focality using disc and ring electrode configurations: FEM analysis. Journal of Neural Engineering, 5, 163–174.
(2006). The power of simulation: Imagining one’s own and other’s behavior. Brain Research, 1079, 4–14.
(2007). The role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interaction: How low-level computational processes contribute to meta-cognition. Neuroscientist, 13, 580–593.
(2003). Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 527–533.
(1993). The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396.
(1994). Conditional and unconditional automaticity: A dual-process model of effects of spatial stimulus-response correspondence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 20, 731–750.
(2015). EEG correlates of impaired self-other integration during joint-task performance in schizophrenia. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1365–1372.
(2013). Keys and seats: Spatial response coding underlying the joint spatial compatibility effect. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75, 1725–1736.
(2012). Increased spatial salience in the social Simon task: A response-coding account of spatial compatibility effects. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 74, 911–929.
(2011). How “social” is the social Simon effect? Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 84. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00084
(2014). The joint Simon effect: A review and theoretical integration. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 974. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00974
(2013). The (not so) social Simon effect: A referential coding account. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 39, 1248–1260.
(2014). The joint flanker effect: Less social than previously thought. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21, 1224–1230.
(2012). Morphometric gray matter differences of the medial frontal cortex influence the social Simon effect. NeuroImage, 61, 1249–1254.
(2014). The Role of Attention in a Joint-Action Effect. PLoS One, 9, e91336.
(1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143–149.
(2012). A finite element analysis of the effect of electrode area and inter-electrode distance on the spatial distribution of the current density in tDCS. Journal of Neural Engineering, 8, 066017.
(2002). Experiencing oneself vs another person as being the cause of an action: The neural correlates of the experience of agency. NeuroImage, 15, 596–603.
(2008). When the choice is ours: Context and agency modulate the neural bases of decision-making. PLoS One, 3, e1899.
(2003). Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 358, 459–473.
(2006). Transcranial DC stimulation (tDCS): A tool for double-blind sham-controlled clinical studies in brain stimulation. Clinical Neurophysiology, 117, 845–850.
(2010). Sharing a task or sharing space? On the effect of the confederate in action coding in a detection task. Cognition, 114, 348–355.
(2007). Regions of MPFC differentially tuned to social and nonsocial affective stimuli. Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 309–316.
(1993a). The role of attention for the Simon effect. Psychological Research, 55, 208–222.
(1993b). The relationship between stimulus processing and response selection in the Simon task: Evidence for a temporal overlap. Psychological Research, 55, 280–290.
(1996). The cognitive representation of action: Automatic integration of perceived action effects. Psychological Research, 59, 176–186.
(2009). How social are task representations? Psychological Science, 20, 794–798.
(2001). The theory of event coding (TEC): A framework for perception and action planning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 849–937.
(2012). tDCS polarity effects in motor and cognitive domains: A meta-analytical review. Experimental Brain Research, 216, 1–10.
(1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 2), New York, NY: Dover Publications.
(2006). The social nature of perception and action. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 99–104.
(1990). Dimensional overlap: Cognitive basis for stimulus-response compatibility – A model and taxonomy. Psychological Review, 97, 252–270.
(2012). Effects of transcranial electrical stimulation on cognition. Clinical EEG and Neuroscience, 43, 192–199.
(2013). Noninvasive brain stimulation can induce paradoxical facilitation. Are these neuroenhancements transferable and meaningful to security services? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 449.
(2009). Safety limits of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation in rats. Clinical Neurophysiology, 120, 1161–1167.
(2014). Interacting hands: The role of attention for the joint Simon effect. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1462. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01462.
(in press). Task demands determine hand posture bias on conflict processing in a Simon task. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
(2011). How two share two tasks: Evidence of a social psychological refractory period effect. Experimental Brain Research, 211, 387–396.
(2012). Action blind: Disturbed self-other integration in schizophrenia. Neuropsychologia, 50, 3775–3780.
(2012). Specifying social cognitive processes with a social dual-task paradigm. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 86.
(2008). What is matched in direct matching? Intention attribution modulates motor priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 34, 578–591.
(2013). Effects of feature integration in a hands-crossed version of the social Simon paradigm. Psychological Research, 77, 240–248.
(2011). Trial-to-trial sequential dependencies in a social and non-social Simon task. Psychological Research, 75, 366–375.
(2005). Bifrontal transcranial direct current stimulation slows reaction time in a working memory task. BMC Neuroscience, 6, 23. doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-6-23
(2011). A tutorial on a practical Bayesian alternative to null hypothesis significance testing. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 679–690.
(2013). Intentional weighting: A basic principle in cognitive control. Psychological Research, 77, 249–259.
(2008). Activity in right temporo-parietal junction is not selective for theory-of-mind. Cerebral Cortex, 18, 262–271.
(2001). Frontopolar and anterior temporal cortex activation in a moral judgment task. Arqivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 59, 657–664.
(2008). Improved naming after transcranial direct current stimulation in aphasia. Journal of Neurology & Neurosurgery Psychiatry, 79, 451–453.
(2008). Anatomical substrates of cooperative joint-action in a continuous motor task: Virtual lifting and balancing. NeuroImage, 41, 169–177.
(1989). Spitting visual space with attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 15, 164–169.
(2012). An agent independent axis for executed and modeled choice in medial prefrontal cortex. Neuron, 75, 1114–1121.
(2008). Transcranial direct current stimulation: State of the art 2008. Brain Stimulation, 1, 206–223.
(2007). Shaping the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation of the human motor cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 97, 3109–3117.
(2003). Safety criteria for transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in humans. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114, 2220–2222.
(2003). Level of activation of cathodal DC polarization induced inhibition of the human motor cortex. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114, 600–604.
(2000). Excitability changes in the human motor cortex by weak transcranial direct current stimulation. Journal of Physiology, 527, 633–639.
(2001). Sustained excitability elevations induced by transcranial DC motor cortex stimulation in humans. Neurology, 57, 1899–18901.
(2004). Cortical midline structures and the self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 102–107.
(1984). Processing stages in overlapping tasks: Evidence for a central bottleneck. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human, Perception and Performance, 10, 358–377.
(1994). Dual-task interference in simple tasks: Data and theory. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 220–244.
(2011). Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES – tDCS; tRNS, tACS) methods. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 21, 602–617.
(2007). Safety aspects of transcranial direct current stimulation concerning healthy subjects and patients. Brain Research Bulletin, 72, 208–214.
(1997). Perception and action planning. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 9, 129–154.
(1995). Bayesian model selection in social research. Sociological Methodology, 25, 111–196.
(2007). Developmental vision determines the reference frame for the multisensory control of action. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 4753–4758.
(2003). What you believe versus what you think they believe: A neuroimaging study of conceptual perspective-taking. European Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 2475–2480.
(2004). How would you feel versus how do you think she would feel? A neuroimaging study of perspective-taking with social emotions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 988–999.
(2012). Enhancing social ability by stimulating right temporoparietal junction. Current Biology, 22, 2274–2277.
(2004). Understanding other minds: Linking developmental psychology and functional neuroimaging. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 87–124.
(2003). People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. NeuroImage, 19, 1835–1842.
(2013). Toward a second-person neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 383–414.
(2014). Functional activity and effective connectivity of the posterior medial prefrontal cortex during processing of incongruent mental states. Human Brain Mapping, 35, 2950–2965.
(2006). Joint action: Bodies and minds moving together. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 70–76.
(2009). Prediction in joint action: What, when, and where. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 353–367.
(2003). Representing other’s actions: Just like one’s own? Cognition, 88, B11–B21.
(2005). How two share a task: Corepresenting stimulus-response mappings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31, 1234–1246.
(2006). Twin peaks: An ERP study to action planning and control in co-acting individuals. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 859–870.
(2007). Is it really my turn? An event-related fMRI study of task sharing. Social Neuroscience, 2, 81–95.
(2015). Referential coding does not rely on location features: Evidence for a non-spatial joint Simon effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 186–195.
(1990).
The effects of an irrelevant directional cue on human information processing . In R. W. ProctorT. G. ReeveEds., Stimulus-response compatibility: An integrated perspective. Advances in Psychology (Vol. 65, pp. 31–86). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland.(1967). Auditory S-R compatibility: The effect of an irrelevant cue on information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 51, 300–304.
(2009a). Control of shared representations relies on key processes involved in mental state attribution. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 3704–3718.
(2009b). Was it me or was it you? How the sense of agency originates from ideomotor learning revealed by fMRI. NeuroImage, 46, 290–298.
(2011). Polarity and timing-dependent effects of transcranial direct current stimulation in explicit motor learning. Neuropsychologia, 49, 800–804.
(2014). The joint Simon effect depends on perceived agency, but not intentionality, of the alternative action. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 595.
(2004). A short history of ideo-motor action. Psychological Research, 68, 176–188.
(2008). Action co-representation is tuned to other humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 2015–2024.
(2006). A common coding framework in self-other interaction: Evidence from joint action task. Experimental Brain Research, 175, 353–362.
(2008). The role of the right temporo-parietal junction in maintaining a coherent sense of one’s body. Neuropsychologia, 46, 3014–3018.
(2010). The virtual co-actor: The social Simon effect does not rely on online feedback from the other. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 208. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00208
(2006). Why you think Milan is larger than Modena: Neural correlates of the recognition heuristic. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1924–1936.
(2007). A practical solution to the pervasive problems of p values. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 779–804.
(2002). The anterior frontomedian cortex and evaluative judgment: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 15, 983–991.
(2003). Functional specialization within the anterior medial prefrontal cortex: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study with human subjects. Neuroscience Letters, 335, 183–186.
