Human neural circuits can comprehend other human beings and their motives
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Peer-reviewed literature indicates that biological neural circuits and brain mechanisms are involved in theory of mind and empathy, allowing humans to infer and comprehend other people's mental states and perspectives.
Theory of Mind is referred to the ability of inferring other’s mental states, and it plays a crucial role in social cognition and learning. Biological evidences indicate that complex circuits are involved in this ability, including the mirror neuron system. The mirror neuron system influences imitation abilities and action understanding, leading to learn through observing others. To simulate this imitative learning behavior, a Theory-of-Mind-based Imitative Reinforcement Learning (ToM-based ImRL) framework is proposed. Employing the bio-inspired spiking neural networks and the mechanisms of the mirror neuron system, ToM-based ImRL is a bio-inspired computational model which enables an agent to effectively learn how to act in an interactive environment through observing an expert, inferring its goals, and imitating its behaviors. The aim of this paper is to review some computational attempts in modeling ToM and to explain the proposed ToM-based ImRL framework which is tested in the environment of River Raid game from Atari 2600 series.
While pre-verbal infants may be sensitive to others' mental states, they are not able to accurately answer questions about them until several years later, an ability referred to as having a theory of mind. Here we ask whether infant social-cognitive sensitivity is subserved by the same brain mechanisms as those that support theory of mind in childhood. To do so, we explored the relationship between functional sensitivity of the right temporal-parietal junction to mental state processing in infancy, a region known to underlie theory of mind in older children, and explicit theory of mind reasoning in the same group several years later. In a small initial sample (N = 33), we find evidence of a longitudinal brain-behavioral link from infancy to childhood, providing preliminary support for a common mechanism for theory of mind across development. However, the brain metric that was predictive of individual differences was not the response to conditions that required tracking the beliefs, but instead, the response to a control condition where belief tracking was not obligatory to predict others' behavior. In hindsight, the ambiguity of this control condition may have best distinguished between infants who had different propensities to engage in belief tracking, suggesting a potential role for active experience in infancy contributing to individual differences in later theory of mind development in childhood. Given the exploratory nature of the study, other alternative explanations for these results must also be considered.
recruit the neural circuits that were activated in controls during an imagine-other perspective—in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala—which
Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. However, there are other (sometimes conflicting) definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Empathy is often considered to be a broad
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