Study title

Functional MRI data are available for 34 participants. All subjects were scanned during a theory of mind localiser task and a novel theory of mind task. Anonymised T1 scans are also available alongside the stimuli and Matlab script for running the experiment. Previous work has shown bilateral temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to be involved in both memory and theory of mind (mindreading) tasks. It remains unclear whether, during mindreading, these regions represent information relevant specifically to the content of what other people are thinking, above and beyond general memory demands. We hypothesised that when a participant uses their “mindreading” abilities to represent someone else’s mental states – e.g., “The target thinks there’s an X in the box” – their brain will represent the content “X” in a way that is distinct from when they only use memory to recall “X”. Distinct representation for mindreading could be quantitative (“more of the same”) or qualitative (different in kind) from representation for memory. The aim of the study was to distinguish between these possibilities with specific emphasis on the right TPJ, mPFC using multi-voxel pattern classification. Full details of the paradigm and analysis can be found in the pre-registration linked below.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...