Mind reading through the eyes: an fMRI study

Mind reading is the ability to understand another person's thoughts, intentions, and feelings (Whiten, 1991). The purpose of this study was to clarify which part of the brain is evoked while mind reading in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, using a mind reading task, the Reading Mind in the Eyes Test (RME: Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) with four choices (mental state words). The participants were right-handed and sex-matched healthy Japanese university students (10 males and 10 females, age range 19-25). We used periodic ABA ... block design in the fMRI sessions. Task A (an experimental task) was the mind reading task and Task B (a control task) was the age-gender task. In order to clarify the activated region of the brain while mind reading, we calculated the difference between the degrees of BOLD (Blood-oxygen-level dependent) activation during the Task A and Task B. The results showed that there was a significant difference in activation of the right superior occipital gyrus, and the left parietal lobe. These findings indicated that these regions were used while mind reading. The role of these regions was discussed in terms of the findings from previous studies.