Metacognitive evaluation, self-relevance, and the right prefrontal cortex
Section snippets
Subjects
Nineteen right-handed, physically and cognitively healthy participants (9 females, 10 males; mean age, 24 years, SD = 3; mean education, 16 years, SD = 2) were recruited from the University of Wisconsin—Madison campus via advertisement. Before study procedures, participants were screened for MRI safety/compatibility and given a standardized questionnaire covering general health history. The exclusion criteria consisted of any chronic medical condition (e.g., neurological, cardiovascular,
Results
An analysis of response times revealed no significant differences among response time means across the three conditions (F = 0.609, P = 0.55). The average response between conditions differed by only 0.03 s. The SPE condition elicited the shortest response times (1.77 s), followed by the SE (1.79 s) and OE (1.81 s) conditions. The response type was evaluated in the SPE condition, which demonstrated an equivalent proportion of “yes” (right button) responses (mean of 50% “yes” responses). This
Discussion
The current study investigated neural activation during self-referential metacognitive evaluation (ME) by comparing two descriptor-referential trait evaluation conditions, that of self-evaluation and significant other-evaluation. When these two descriptor-referential conditions were separately compared to the same nonreferential semantic positivity-evaluation condition, both self- and other-evaluation evoked a very similar pattern of activation in the anterior medial prefrontal and
Conclusion
A number of studies including this one have now shown that ME of the self or of others activates a network involving the medial prefrontal cortex and retrosplenial cortex. The present study extends these findings by directly comparing the cerebral response during metacognitive evaluation of the self and a significant other and finding right dorsolateral prefrontal activation increases as a function of personal relevance. The right anterior prefrontal cortex has long been implicated in previous
Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by MH65723 (SCJ). The assistance of Michael Anderle, Ron Fisher, and Natalie Rahming is greatly appreciated.
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