Minds at rest? Social cognition as the default mode of cognizing and its putative relationship to the “default system” of the brain

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.03.013

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 17, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 457-467

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2008.03.013 Get rights and content

Abstract

The “default system” of the brain has been described as a set of regions which are ‘activated’ during rest and ‘deactivated’ during cognitively effortful tasks. To investigate the reliability of task-related deactivations, we performed a meta-analysis across 12 fMRI studies. Our results replicate previous findings by implicating medial frontal and parietal brain regions as part of the “default system”.

However, the cognitive correlates of these deactivations remain unclear. In light of the importance of social cognitive abilities for human beings and their propensity to engage in such activities, we relate our results to findings from neuroimaging studies of social cognition. This demonstrates a remarkable overlap between the brain regions typically involved in social cognitive processes and the “default system”.

We, henceforth, suggest that the physiological ‘baseline’ of the brain is intimately linked to a psychological ‘baseline’: human beings have a predisposition for social cognition as the default mode of cognizing which is implemented in the robust pattern of intrinsic brain activity known as the “default system”.

Section snippets

The “default mode of brain function” and its cognitive correlates

Functional neuroimaging studies have typically made use of ‘stimulation paradigms’ to assess task- or stimulus-dependent increases in brain activity. Here activations are defined by subtracting activity levels during a reference or control state from those related to a target or experimental condition. The resulting pattern of activations, i.e., increases of neural activity, is generally assumed to reflect the neural correlates of the cognitive processes of interest. Reversely, the subtraction

Self-consciousness and its social dimension

We suppose that a continuum exists between full ‘immersion’ in the stimulus-dependent performance of a given task on the one hand and stimulus-independent or unconstrained cognition on the other. During the former our cognitive resources could be thought of as bound by perceiving, adequately representing and responding to external stimulation to such a degree that we are completely immersed in this activity. During the latter, a relative lack of external stimulation may drive us to refer to

Social cognition involving self–other-distinction and self–other-exchange

Given the tight coupling of representations of self and other, social cognition can be conceptualized more specifically as self–other-distinction and self–other-exchange. Survival in a social world requires the ability to distinguish between oneself and others and the ability to adequately ascribe mental states to oneself or someone else as the ‘owner’ or ‘agent’ of mental states. The proper ascription of mental states to oneself and others critically hinges upon the adequate representation of

Probing the “default system”: Inter-study deactivation commonalities across 12 fMRI studies

To test the robustness of task-related deactivations across a variety of different cognitive neuroscience paradigms, we performed a deactivation analysis across 12 fMRI studies whose functional MR images had all been acquired most recently on the same Siemens ‘Trio’ 3 Tesla whole-body scanner (Erlangen, Germany) using blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast (Gradient-echo EPI pulse sequence) (see Table 1). Additional high-resolution anatomical images had been acquired using a standard

The “default system” and social cognition

Despite the apparent difficulties of providing a well-defined concept of ‘self’, a considerable number of neuroimaging studies have attempted to experimentally investigate its neural correlates (Northoff et al., 2006). Given that we observe a close link between ‘resting state’ cognition and social cognition comprising self–other-distinction and self–other-exchange, it is not surprising that considerable overlap exists between the neural signatures of the DS and the neural correlates of social

Conclusions

Taken together the findings from studies exploring the neural correlates of ‘resting states’ or unconstrained cognition (including our own meta-analysis) as well as those investigating the neural basis of social cognition demonstrate considerable overlap between task-related deactivations seen in the former and task-related activations seen in the latter types of investigations. On this basis, we propose, first, that the overlap of the neural signatures of ‘resting states’ and of social

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our colleagues Corrado Corradi-dell’Acqua, Nicole David, Christian Grefkes, Juraj Kukolja, Bojana Kuzmanovic, Natacha Santos, Markus Thimm, Barbara Tomasino, Nora Vetter, Simone Vossel and Ralph Weidner for providing data from their respective studies for our meta-analysis.

Additionally, L.S. thank Nicole David, Stefan Heim, Bojana Kuzmanovic and David Sharp for helpful comments and stimulating discussions.

L.S. was supported by the Kompetenzzentrum NeuroNRW at the Ministry of