Citation

Desmet C, Deschrijver E, Brass M. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2014; 9(4): 427-435.

Affiliation

Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium, charlotte.desmet@Ugent.be.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nst002

PMID

23314011

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved in error execution as well as error observation. Based on this finding, it has been argued that recognizing each other's mistakes might rely on motor simulation. In the current fMRI study we directly tested this hypothesis by investigating whether medial prefrontal activity in error observation is restricted to situations that enable simulation. To this aim we compared brain activity related to the observation of errors that can be simulated (human errors) with brain activity related to errors that cannot be simulated (machine errors). We show that medial prefrontal activity is not restricted to the observation of human errors but also occurs when observing errors of a machine. In addition, our data indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex reflects a domain general mechanism of monitoring violations of expectancies.

Language: en