title: The neural correlates of internal and external comparisons: an fMRI study.
abstract: Many previous studies have suggested that various comparisons rely on the same cognitive and neural mechanisms. However, little attention has been paid to exploring the commonalities and differences between the internal comparison based on concepts or rules and the external comparison based on perception. In the present experiment, moral beauty comparison and facial beauty comparison were selected as the representatives of internal comparison and external comparison, respectively. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to record brain activity while participants compared the level of moral beauty of two scene drawings containing moral acts or the level of facial beauty of two face photos. In addition, a physical size comparison task with the same stimuli as the beauty comparison was included. We observed that both the internal moral beauty comparison and external facial beauty comparison obeyed a typical distance effect and this behavioral effect recruited a common frontoparietal network involved in comparisons of simple physical magnitudes such as size. In addition, compared to external facial beauty comparison, internal moral beauty comparison induced greater activity in more advanced and complex cortical regions, such as the bilateral middle temporal gyrus and middle occipital gyrus, but weaker activity in the putamen, a subcortical region. Our results provide novel neural evidence for the comparative process and suggest that different comparisons may rely on both common cognitive processes as well as distinct and specific cognitive components.
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China.
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wen
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China.
authors.forename: Yanhui
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Jonathan S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Cant
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Psychology and Special Education, National Institute of Education Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Tingting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Gerald
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cupchik
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China.
authors.forename: Ruiwang
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China. molei@scnu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001504:Beauty; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: External comparison; Facial beauty; Internal comparison; Moral beauty; fMRI