Animacy semantic network supports causal inferences about illness.

ABSTRACT: Inferring the causes of illness is a culturally universal example of causal thinking. We tested the hypothesis that making causal inferences about biological processes (e.g. illness) depends on the animacy semantic network. Participants (n=20) undergoing fMRI read two-sentence vignettes that elicited implicit causal inferences across sentences, either about the emergence of illness or about the mechanical breakdown of inanimate objects, in addition to noncausal control vignettes. All vignettes were about people and were linguistically matched. The same participants performed localizer tasks: language, logical reasoning, and mentalizing. Inferring illness causes, relative to all control conditions, selectively engaged a portion of the precuneus (PC) previously implicated in the seman

SUBMITTER: Hauptman M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12611283 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature