Cargando…

Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition

People are better able to empathize with others when they are given information concerning the context driving that person’s experiences. This suggests that people draw on prior memories when empathizing, but the mechanisms underlying this connection remain largely unexplored. The present study inve...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Pehrs, Corinna, Zaki, Jamil, Taruffi, Liila, Kuchinke, Lars, Koelsch, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010422/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29925874
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24557-y
_version_ 1783333572810113024
author Pehrs, Corinna
Zaki, Jamil
Taruffi, Liila
Kuchinke, Lars
Koelsch, Stefan
author_facet Pehrs, Corinna
Zaki, Jamil
Taruffi, Liila
Kuchinke, Lars
Koelsch, Stefan
author_sort Pehrs, Corinna
collection PubMed
description People are better able to empathize with others when they are given information concerning the context driving that person’s experiences. This suggests that people draw on prior memories when empathizing, but the mechanisms underlying this connection remain largely unexplored. The present study investigates how variations in episodic information shape the emotional response towards a movie character. Episodic information is either absent or provided by a written context preceding empathic film clips. It was shown that sad context information increases empathic concern for a movie character. This was tracked by neural activity in the temporal pole (TP) and anterior hippocampus (aHP). Dynamic causal modeling with Bayesian Model Selection has shown that context changes the effective connectivity from left aHP to the right TP. The same crossed-hemispheric coupling was found during rest, when people are left to their own thoughts. We conclude that (i) that the integration of episodic memory also supports the specific case of integrating context into empathic judgments, (ii) the right TP supports emotion processing by integrating episodic memory into empathic inferences, and (iii) lateral integration is a key process for episodic simulation during rest and during task. We propose that a disruption of the mechanism may underlie empathy deficits in clinical conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-6010422
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2018
publisher Nature Publishing Group UK
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-60104222018-07-06 Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition Pehrs, Corinna Zaki, Jamil Taruffi, Liila Kuchinke, Lars Koelsch, Stefan Sci Rep Article People are better able to empathize with others when they are given information concerning the context driving that person’s experiences. This suggests that people draw on prior memories when empathizing, but the mechanisms underlying this connection remain largely unexplored. The present study investigates how variations in episodic information shape the emotional response towards a movie character. Episodic information is either absent or provided by a written context preceding empathic film clips. It was shown that sad context information increases empathic concern for a movie character. This was tracked by neural activity in the temporal pole (TP) and anterior hippocampus (aHP). Dynamic causal modeling with Bayesian Model Selection has shown that context changes the effective connectivity from left aHP to the right TP. The same crossed-hemispheric coupling was found during rest, when people are left to their own thoughts. We conclude that (i) that the integration of episodic memory also supports the specific case of integrating context into empathic judgments, (ii) the right TP supports emotion processing by integrating episodic memory into empathic inferences, and (iii) lateral integration is a key process for episodic simulation during rest and during task. We propose that a disruption of the mechanism may underlie empathy deficits in clinical conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. Nature Publishing Group UK 2018-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC6010422/ /pubmed/29925874 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24557-y Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Pehrs, Corinna
Zaki, Jamil
Taruffi, Liila
Kuchinke, Lars
Koelsch, Stefan
Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title_full Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title_fullStr Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title_full_unstemmed Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title_short Hippocampal-Temporopolar Connectivity Contributes to Episodic Simulation During Social Cognition
title_sort hippocampal-temporopolar connectivity contributes to episodic simulation during social cognition
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010422/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29925874
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24557-y
work_keys_str_mv AT pehrscorinna hippocampaltemporopolarconnectivitycontributestoepisodicsimulationduringsocialcognition
AT zakijamil hippocampaltemporopolarconnectivitycontributestoepisodicsimulationduringsocialcognition
AT taruffiliila hippocampaltemporopolarconnectivitycontributestoepisodicsimulationduringsocialcognition
AT kuchinkelars hippocampaltemporopolarconnectivitycontributestoepisodicsimulationduringsocialcognition
AT koelschstefan hippocampaltemporopolarconnectivitycontributestoepisodicsimulationduringsocialcognition