Human reasoning on social interactions in naturalistic context: insights from the theory of mind brain circuits.

The relationship between neural social cognition patterns and performance on social cognition tasks in daily life is a topic of debate, with key consideration given to the extent to which theory of mind (ToM) brain circuits share properties reflecting the naturalistic context. To test implicit and explicit mentalizing in naturalistic context, we used an experimental fMRI paradigm that provided brain activation within the ToM brain circuits. We conducted the experiment on 42 adults and found that only explicit mentalizing, which involved silent viewing and two-choice answers, elicited activation of ToM neural circuits when animations of everyday social interactions were presented. We also observed that the nature of ToM reasoning, i.e., affective or cognitive, played a significant role in activating different neural circuits. By considering the condition (implicit vs explicit) and nature (affective vs cognitive) of social interactions in naturalistic context, we can understand the similarities and differences across ToM brain circuits during social interactions.