Salience driven attention is pivotal to understanding others’ intentions

ABSTRACT

Interpreting others’ beliefs, desires and intentions is known as “theory of mind” (ToM), and is often evaluated using simplified measurement tools, which may not correctly reflect the brain circuits that are required for real-life ToM functioning. We aimed to identify the brain structures necessary to correctly infer intentions from realistic scenarios by administering The Awareness of Social Inference Test, Enriched subtest to 47 patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, 24 patients with progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome, 31 patients with Alzheimer’s syndrome, and 77 older healthy controls. Neuroimaging data was analyzed using voxel based morphometry, and participants’ understanding of intentions was correlated with voxel-wise and region-of interest data. We found that structural integrity of the cinguloinsular cortex in the salience network (SN) was more pivotal for accurate ToM than previously described, emphasizing the importance of the SN for selectively recognizing and attending to social cues during ToM inferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Social cognition
• theory of mind
• neurodegenerative diseases
• neuropsychology
• voxel-based morphometry
• salience network

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the patients and caregivers for participating in this research, and Laura Bouvet for their help with data acquisition. Voxel-based morphometry analyses were performed using the UCSF Brainsight system, developed at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center by Katherine P. Rankin, Cosmo Mielke, and Paul Sukhanov, and powered by the VLSM script written by Stephen M. Wilson, with funding from the Rainwater Charitable Foundation and the UCSF Chancellor’s Fund for Precision Medicine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant [numbers R01AG029577 (PI: Rankin), K23-AG021606 (PI: Rankin), P01AG019724 (PI: Miller), P50AG023501 (PI: Miller)]; Larry L. Hillblom foundation under Grant [number 2002/2j (PI: Rankin), 2014-A-004-NET (PI: Kramer)].