MENTALISING brain signatures occur when an individual thinks about personality traits in themselves and others which has important implications for navigating social interactions. This study reveals that mentalising is associated with distinct neural patterns that emerge by adolescence and are functionally altered in severe mental health conditions such as schizophrenia.
Mentalising Brain Signatures
Mentalising brain signatures were developed using an interpretable machine learning framework applied to multiple datasets with a total sample size of 390 participants.
fMRI data were used to train and validate classifiers that distinguished mentalising about the self, mentalising about another person, and a combined model capturing both processes.
The study assessed neural representations associated with internal state attribution and trait-based reasoning. Self-mentalising was primarily associated with anterior and medial brain regions, whereas other mentalising was linked to posterior and lateral regions. The approach enabled the identification of reproducible neural patterns that underpin social cognitive processing in humans.
Classifier Performance Across Self- and Other-Mentalising
Mentalising classifiers achieved out-of-sample prediction accuracy of 82% for self-mentalising and 77% for other mentalising. A combined classifier trained across both mentalising conditions achieved 98% predictive accuracy and was able to distinguish attributional inferences from factual inferences.
The classifier patterns demonstrated clear neural separation between self-related and other related mentalising processes in healthy adults. In addition, the distribution of brain weights indicated consistent involvement of anterior medial regions for self-mentalising and posterior lateral regions for other mentalising.
These findings suggest that mentalising brain signatures are consistent and can be clearly distinguished across different mental state attribution tasks.
Clinical Implications
Mentalising brain signatures also revealed differences in neural separation between self- and other-mentalising in clinical and developmental contexts. Healthy adults showed stronger differentiation of self- and other-mentalising patterns compared with individuals with schizophrenia. Additionally, increasing age during adolescence was associated with changes in the degree of separation between mentalising patterns.
These findings indicate that there are largely distinct neural mechanisms in severe neuropsychiatric disorders and from the age of adolescence that are involved in self- and other-mentalising that build on overall mentalising capacity.
The results support mentalising signatures as candidate neuromarkers for investigating social cognition in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions.
Reference
Açıl D et al. Brain neuromarkers predict self- and other-related mentalizing across adult, clinical, and developmental samples. Nat Commun. 2026; DOI:10.1038/s41467-026-73945-w
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