心理理论(Theory of Mind)是认知发展领域的一个重要课题,主要包括对他人的信念、意图、行为道德和情感等的理解。本文综述了近年来应用脑成像技术,在心理理论的几个主要研究领域中取得的重要成果。这些研究发现,与心理理论相关的脑区主要是内侧前额区、颞顶联合区、颞上沟、颞极和杏仁核等。心理理论的脑机制受到了包括实验材料呈现方式、文化语言背景和实验范式等众多因素的影响。
Almost all written languages currently used in the world are alphabetic or phonologically-based scripts (e.g., English) whose word recognition involves discrimination of one-dimensional linear combinations of several dozens of letters or phonological units, except written Chinese whose vocabulary consists of a large number of block characters, the analysis of which relies on the extraction of 2-dimensional form information at multiple levels including radical, character, and multiple-character word. Whether the dramatic contrast between the 2 types of orthography leads to distinctive mental processes is a fundamental question in psycholinguistic research unanswered in the past three decades. Using event-related potentials and visual lexical decision tasks, we asked native Chinese speakers to discriminate between real Chinese words and pseudoor non-words and observed a widespread negative deflection with centro-parietal focus elicited 200 ms post-stimulus onset. This N200 response showed a clear and large amplitude enhancement upon word repetition and seems to be specific to Chinese as no similar effects had been reported in word recognition studies involving alphabetic scripts under similar experimental conditions. Further evidence showed that this N200 could not be attributed to non-linguistic sensori-perceptual processes, nor phonological or semantic processes, but likely reflects very early identification of the orthography of individual words involving extensive and higher-level visual analysis. Recently the first author proposed a meaning-spelling theory of written Chinese vocabulary proposing that the Chinese and alphabetic scripts are the only 2 possible logical types of mature human writing systems, and that the former is more thoroughly a visual language compared with the latter and thus shall emphasize more of visual processing. Reinforcing each other, the meaning-spelling theory and the discovery of the centro-parietal N200 reveal the uniqueness of Chinese both theoretically and empirically, and provid
ZHANG John XFANG ZhuoDU YingChunKONG LingYueZHANG QinXING Qiang
