Marine Le Petit (ULiège) "Cognitive and brain bases of the attribution of mental states"

Monday 10 Mar 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: Mindreading is a social ability that involves the attribution of mental states to oneself or to others. The brain regions underlying this ability are now well identified, with the medial prefrontal cortex at the core of this network. Its role and the functional interactions it maintains with the other regions of mindreading are, however, still debated. Recent work has highlighted the importance of assessing mindreading in social situations that are close to everyday life. The aim of this work is to better understand the functioning of the networks and associated brain regions, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying mindreading in everyday social situations. Our results highlight the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in the integration of various representations and their probabilities to predict social events. This region is connected to a larger brain network than the one classically described. This work illustrates how the involvement of individuals in social interactions influences the brain substrates involved in mindreading.

Bio: Marine Le Petit is a postdoctoral researcher in GIGA CRC In vivo Imaging - Aging & Memory. She studied Integrative Biology and Physiology at Sorbonne University in Paris and completed her PhD at the Neuropsychology and Imaging of Human Memory lab in Caen, France, supervised by Mickaël Laisney and Francis Eustache. Her PhD aimed at investigating links between the cognitive mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states (called theory of mind), and the functioning of the associated brain networks. During one year, she joined the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens (France) where she was teaching courses in neuropsychology while conducting research on the cognitive bases of theory of mind. She is now working on the EntCogFlex project in Fabienne’s team, in which she is studying the influence of entrepreneurial experience on cognitive flexibility and decision-making.

 

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