Cortical mechanisms of pretense observation

Abstract

Pretend play emerges in children the world over around 18 months and continues into adolescence and even adulthood. Observing and engaging in pretense are thought to rely on similar neural mechanisms, but little is known about them. Here we examined neural activation patterns associated with observing pretense acts, including high-likelihood, low-likelihood, and imaginary substitute objects, as compared with activation patterns when observing parallel real acts. The association between fantasy predisposition and cortical representations of pretense was also explored. Supporting prior research that used more limited types of pretense, observed pretense acts, when contrasted with real acts, elicited activity in regions associated with mentalizing. A novel contribution here is that substitute object pretense (high- and low-likelihood) elicited significantly more activity than imaginary (pantomime) acts not only in theory of mind regions but also in the superior parietal lobule, a region thought to aid in the prediction and error-monitoring of motor actions. Finally, when high-likelihood pretense acts were contrasted with real acts, participants with elevated fantasy predispositions evidenced significantly different activation patterns than their more reality-prone peers. Future research will explore the intersection of fantasy predisposition and experience with the neural representation of pretense.

Keywords:

• Pretend play
• Biological motion
• Theory of mind
• Fantasy orientation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to EDS, by National Science Foundation Grant #1024293 and a grant from the Brady Education Foundation awarded to ASL, and by NIH grant R00MH079617 awarded to JPM.

Notes

¹Note that Schubotz and von Cramon (2009) documented activity principally within areas of the “mirror neuron system” (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004) and not the ToM network. We agree with these authors that the source of this disparity is methodological differences, with Schubotz and von Cramon's stimuli consisting of only hands interacting with objects and not an actor carry out the actions. Furthermore, our primary interest in this line of work concerns observing pretense as it naturally occurs. For this reason, we chose to compare our study with previous work that most closely matches its methodology.