BackgroundThe substantial discrepancy between mentalising in experimental settings v. real-life social interactions hinders the understanding of the neural basis of real-life social cognition and of social impairments in psychiatric disorders.AimsTo determine the neural mechanisms underlying naturalistic mentalising in individuals with and without autism spectrum disorder.MethodWe investigated mentalising with a new video-based functional magnetic resonance imaging task in 20 individuals with autism spectrum disorder and 22 matched healthy controls.ResultsNaturalistic mentalising implicated regions of the traditional mentalising network (medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction), and additionally the insula and amygdala. Moreover, amygdala activity predicted implicit mentalising performance on an independent behavioural task. Compared with controls, the autism spectrum disorder group did not show differences in neural activity within classical mentalising regions. They did, however, show reduced amygdala activity and a reduced correlation between amygdala activity and mentalising accuracy on the behavioural task, compared with controls.ConclusionsThese findings highlight the crucial role of the amygdala in making accurate implicit mental state inferences in typical development and in the social cognitive impairments of individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 06 June 2016.
All research outputs
#22,030,469
of 34,342,227 outputs
Outputs from British Journal of Psychiatry
#5,852
of 7,418 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#293,979
of 496,070 outputs
Outputs of similar age from British Journal of Psychiatry
#4,729
of 5,898 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,342,227 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 35th percentile – i.e., 35% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,418 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.5. This one is in the 20th percentile – i.e., 20% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 496,070 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 40th percentile – i.e., 40% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 5,898 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 19th percentile – i.e., 19% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
