Posterior left TPJ plays a critical role in tracking spontaneously other people's thoughts

In a recent study we have shown that humans have a specific brain region which helps spontaneously tracking what other people think. More specifically, we have shown that when the posterior left temporo-parietal junction (left pTPJ) is damaged, the patients cannot spontaneously infer anymore that someone else has a false belief. However, these very same patients were perfectly able to infer other people's false beliefs when explicitly asked to do so. Although several studies have shown that the right TPJ plays a more specific role in mental state attribution than the left TPJ, we bring new evidence showing that the role of the left TPJ is not less important for efficient ToM processing. This finding has been reported in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2016).